A federal budget, yes, but compromises hurt UO & national physics

By Jim Barlow, Office of Public and Media Relations

What happened in December passed by hardly noticed amid the fractious debate involving priorities between the Democrat-controlled Congress and White House, but one part of the results has left the University of Oregon science community struggling.

In fact, the new federal budget that surfaced dropped a sledgehammer on the UO physics department. Nationally, the 2008 budget decimated the U.S. Department of Energy’s particle physics program. Instead of an expected $782 million, only $688 million came through. All this coming after the president and congressional appropriations committees had been in agreement on the need for strong budgets for the physical sciences.

Media have pretty much ignored the story, except for major science publications and those newspapers that cover the two most grossly affected programs based in California and Illinois.

“I can't feel very good about saying this, but the only positive news for us is that it could have been worse,” said Stephen Kevan, head of the UO physics department. “Indeed, it looks much worse in high energy and plasma physics. What Congress did to us is unconscionable given the nation's pressing energy needs that demand major efforts in basic and applied research.”

The University of Oregon is very much a part of the big picture of the national impact. Many UO physicists and chemists are involved in the affected research areas.

At the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC), program cutbacks include layoffs of some 225 of 1,650 employees. Already this month, 80 SLAC staffers have resigned, with the remaining layoffs to be announced in February. SLAC will be getting $95 million -- a 20 percent reduction from the anticipated $120 million. Being axed completely, seven months earlier than expected, is SLAC’s PEP-II collider, which provides particle collisions for BaBar, a high-energy physics experiment. The UO’s experimental high-energy physics group has been a member of the BaBar Collaboration for more than eight years.

“We have two research associates and four graduate students in residence at SLAC working on this important experiment which has made insightful measurements of heavy quarks and leptons,” said physicist Jim Brau, a Knight Professor of Natural Science in the UO’s physics department. “This includes a precision understanding of CP-violation, an important feature of nature where matter and anti-matter differ, and relevant in understanding how the universe ended up being dominated by matter over anti-matter. The science remains compelling. However, due to the cuts in funding, BaBar will be terminated prematurely. This is a serious loss to our scientific program.”

In Illinois, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab faces equally disturbing cuts that will delay progress on Fermi's NOvA neutrino project in northern Minnesota and, much to Brau’s dismay, the development of the proposed 20-mile long International Linear Collider (ILC), a project shared with SLAC and other international labs. In a Chicago Tribune story Jan. 20, science and technology writer Jon Van reported that Fermi expects 200 immediate layoffs, unpaid days off for remaining workers and the prospect of being closed altogether sometime in the future.

"This wasn't done to punish Fermilab or physics," Pier Oddone, Fermilab's director, told the Tribune. “But lack of intent doesn't lessen the damage from a $52 million budget cut, which stops all planning for a new physics machine that Fermilab hopes to land. Failing to win that machine puts Fermilab on the road to closing down as its current facility, the Tevatron, will soon become obsolete.”

Brau is a leading player in the International Linear Collider, envisioned as freeway to new understanding of matter in the universe. It is to feature the construction of two facing linear accelerators capable of hurling electrons and their anti-particles, positrons, at each other at speeds close to the speed of light.

“The ILC program is being cut to a "keep-alive" level in Fiscal Year ‘08 with deep reductions in effort in the US,” Brau said. “Hundreds of employees at the National Labs (Fermilab and SLAC) who we collaborate with are being laid off. Our multi-million dollar UO umbrella grant for detector research and development will not be funded for FY08 – or will be only at a very reduced level, perhaps. In the meantime, our colleagues overseas carry on. We are hopeful that Congress will restore funding by FY09, and we will eventually achieve our goals.”

Kevan’s role as a principal investigator on one grant and co-principal on another – each one is for $5 million through the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory – is in jeopardy. Already delayed for two years but supposedly looking good for FY 2008 until the budget ax fell, these projects, which had been considered top priorities in the Advanced Light Source’s strategic plan for the DOE’s synchrotron radiation facilities, probably won’t happen in FY 2008, Kevan said.

There is also little chance now, Kevan said, for plans that had seemed imminent even last fall for a new X-ray detector venture through the Berkeley lab that would have directly benefited UO physics. The plan would have led to a new detector, adding new technology to existing equipment, that would enhance UO research by several orders of magnitude.

Also left hanging, Kevan said, is a “very good but high-risk proposal” that he, UO physicist Dave Cohen and UO chemist Geri Richmond – along with faculty members from both the UO and Oregon State University – that had made through preliminary stages and was awaiting final word from Congress. The cuts to the DOE cast clouds over the plan to study exotic photovoltaic structures having the promise to significantly increase the efficiency of inexpensive solar cells.

Nationally, the American Physical Society has urged Congress and the Bush Administration to revisit the fiscal 2008 budget. The society represents more than 46,000 physicists in universities, industry and national laboratories. The budget, as passed, is “extraordinarily damaging to the nation's science and technology enterprise … [and] fails to fund appropriately the research and education programs authorized in the bipartisan America COMPETES Act, which President Bush signed into law only four months ago, the society noted in late December.

“The consequential layoffs of scientists and engineers throughout the nation will discourage American youth from pursuing these fields, just as the country needs their participation to sustain economic growth and national security,” according to an APS news release.

Locally, a group of UO scientists have been visiting with elected officials and their staffs to convey the budget’s implications on the international collider project and on the University of Oregon. Brau and eight other UO physicists and chemists (Paul Csonka,

N.G. Deshpande, Ray Frey, Rudy Hwa, Michael Kellman, Graham Kribs, David Strom and Eric Torrence) met with U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio’s district director Karmen Fore.

Brau also spoke briefly about the budget’s impacts at a town hall meeting held by U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden in Cottage Grove. Brau also discussed this issue with Dennis Worden, who is U.S. Rep. David Wu's science and technology legislative assistant.

The on-going support of Oregon's political delegation is most appreciated, and the reception to the visits by Brau and other UO scientists has been warm and understanding.

Other reports indicate that efforts are being made to provide some remedies at the federal level through various forms of supplemental funding. Illinois and California delegations are pursuing this approach. The UO delegation has been carrying a message that scientific research in the United States is important for economic and national security, the technical workforce and maintaining international cooperation.

It is time for the policymakers to think again about what harm they have done on the political playground. Somehow a balance or a stabilizing structure must be struck at the federal level so that competing needs -- such as war, a struggling economy and other unexpected crises -- don't continually throw U.S. science endeavors into chaos.

What has happened is depressing and discouraging, and it sends a damaging message to researchers, students and prospective students that the physical sciences are expendable when other national needs rise to the surface. Our international credibility in science is at stake. Physics in recent years has been recognized as an integral part in many subjects, with findings and collaborations working their way into biology, neuroscience and medicine. Physics is not just quirks and quarks and big bangs.

In his interview with the Chicago Tribune, Michael Lubell, a physicist at the City College of New York and public affairs director for the APS, put it best: "I have never seen a situation in my life where the budget process broke down as badly as it did this year. It's hard to understand why."