For more than a decade, British scientists have been among the leading lights in the development of the proposed International Linear Collider, a next-generation particle accelerator that researchers hope will ultimately join CERN's Large Hadron Collider in probing the universe's secrets.
But now, in a funding statement released earlier this week, the British Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC), a key national funding body, said it would cut off funding the country's participation in the project.
The note was terse, with little information involved – just a two lines in a 22 page document:
The news has outraged scientists across the country, and sent ripples of disappointment across the world.
British scientists involved in the project are calling for reinstatement of the funding, which they say was dropped for reasons unrelated to the scientific merits of the ILC proposal.
"We are particularly unhappy that this strategy has been devised in secrecy with minimal consultation with the broader scientific community," the scientists wrote in a statement released today. "We believe that it is scientific vandalism to throw all this away in order to make a small dent in a much larger STFC financial shortfall."
Funding shortfalls at the STFC have also threatened a number of other scientific projects, including the nation's participation in the Gemini telescopes in Hawaii and Chile, and the Isaac Newton telescopes in the
Canary Islands.
For now, the STFC document puts the British participation in the ILC
project in limbo. It's possible that political pressure will help reinstate the money – about $28 million dollars needed to complete the upcoming engineering phase, before construction begins. The substantial withdrawal of British participation would be a severe blow to a project predicated on international cooperation, however.
(Image: Early work on a cryostat, a mechanism for maintaining low temperatures, for the ILC project. Credit: Fermilab Visual Media
Services)
