US Budget Spells New Troubles For Next-Gen Particle Accelerator

Last week came news that Britain is slashing its funding for the proposed International Linear Collider (ILC), a proposed next-generation particle accelerator viewed by the physics community worldwide as a critical next step in understanding how the universe is actually constructed.

Now the U.S. House of Representatives has passed its belated budget bill, and there's even more bad news for the ILC there.

The details are covered here by the newsletter for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). In short, the ILC project is receiving just $15 million, down from the $60 million proposed in the White House's original budget request. Another research area, study of superconducting radio frequency (SCRF) associated with the ILC, has been cut from $23 million to $5.45 million.

Here's SLAC's take on the cuts:

These decisions will certainly be a major blow to ILC progress both at
SLAC and internationally. ... SLAC and other national labs will certainly feel the impact of these budget figures.

The budget bill still must be passed by the Senate. But it looks bad for these programs, along with several other areas of important physics research.

It's undeniably true that the country has suffered though years of abysmal financial management, and more bad economic news likely to be on the horizon makes cuts necessary. But this is an important issue. The U.S. is fast losing its leading role in particle physics;
anyone who doesn't want to see this trend accelerate in the near future might want to shoot their local senator a very quick note of polite protest.

The problems could well run deeper than the parochial U.S. interests, too. If both the U.S. and Britain pull away from significant project funding, the entire ILC effort itself – which is predicated on strong internationally participation – will become dangerously fragile.

We'll be following this issue, both from a U.S. funding perspective, and the health of the ILC project in general, as the debate continues.

UPDATE: The anonymous reader who tipped us to this in the first place -- thanks, Anonymous!*) points also to Fermilab Director Pier Oddone's comments. Fermilab is also losing funding for a project called NOvA, a neutrino study that was slated to kick in after the Tevatron, the facility's current world-class accelerator, is superceded by CERN's Large Hadron Collider.

Writing here, Oddone's comments are dark indeed:

Since a quarter of the fiscal year has already gone by, this essentially means a shutdown of the R&D on ILC and SCRF for the rest of the fiscal year. This is a body blow to the future of the ILC, the U.S. role in it and Fermilab. ... These proposed cuts, which come on top of the very limited particle physics budgets of the last few years, are destructive of our field and our laboratory. There is no way to sugar-coat this.

The Fiscal Year 2008 Budget [SLAC Today]

Black Monday [Fermilab Today]

(Image: Simulation of an event that might be seen inside the ILC. If it is ever built. Credit: ILC)

*Reader's name redacted at reader's request, 12/18/07 at 6:40 PM. -Editor