Related press releases
Related research
SLAC has Announced Layoffs of 225 Employees to Meet Congressional Budget Cuts
:: 14 January, 2008
As a result of Congressional budget cuts for the 2008 fiscal year, the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) has announced the anticipated layoffs of 225 of its 1,650 employees, in addition to financial cutbacks to some of its programs.
Eighty members of the SLAC staff have voluntarily announced their resignations, according to Lee Lyons, the lab’s director of human resources — leaving almost 150 jobs still to be cut. Lyons said the specifics of the additional layoffs will be announced in February.
In coming months, “the biggest issues will be working with the staff who are laid off,” said Lyons, citing the added need for job counseling for those leaving and group rebuilding for those who remain.
The lab had been expecting to change about 100 positions before the budget cut in order to hire employees with different skill sets for their new project, the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), Lyons said. The project will be the world’s first hard X-ray free-electron laser.
Despite budget cuts, the LCLS remains fully funded and on schedule for a late 2009 opening, according to a SLAC press release.
Other programs were not so lucky. The $550 billion omnibus spending package passed by Congress in December included just $95 million in funding for SLAC — a 20 percent reduction from the $120 million expected by lab leadership.
One experiment known as the B-factory is now set to end in early March, seven months earlier than planned.
Also affected are SLAC’s new photon science institutes, the Photon Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering Center, which designs experiments for the LCLS and studies ultra fast atomic-scale processes, and the X-ray Laboratory for Advanced Materials, which studies the atomic-scale properties of new materials. Both will have plans for growth scaled back as a result of the budget shortfalls, according to the press release.
SLAC is not the only particle physics lab affected by the reduced congressional spending package. The Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Batavia, Ill. faces similar cuts in funding and staff. The cuts will impede progress on that lab’s NOvA neutrino project and development of the International Linear Collider (ILC), a project it shares with SLAC and other international labs.
The project aims to expand the understanding of matter in the universe by building two facing linear accelerators capable of hurling electrons and their anti-particles, positrons, at each other at a rate just shy of the speed of light, according to the ILC Web site. The feat “would take physics to the next level,” Lyons said.
But Congress cut this fiscal year’s funding for the project from an anticipated $60 million to $15 million. Already, three months into the fiscal year, SLAC has spent a quarter of their anticipated budget — what has turned out to be their allotment for the entire year — and had to halt work on the project.
While work will continue on other projects, the impending threat of job loss will weigh on the minds of many.
“I think our biggest challenge over the next couple months,” Lyons said, “will be helping people deal with that uncertainty and anxiety.”
Note for Free Electron Laser
A free electron laser, or FEL, is a laser that shares the same optical properties as conventional lasers such as emitting a beam consisting of coherent electromagnetic radiation which can reach high power, but which uses some very different operating principles to form the beam. Unlike gas, liquid, or solid-state lasers such as diode lasers, in which electrons are excited in bound atomic or molecular states, FELs use a relativistic electron beam as the lasing medium which move freely through a magnetic structure, hence the term free electron. The free electron laser has the widest frequency range of any laser type, and can be widely tunable, currently ranging in wavelength from microwaves, through terahertz radiation and infrared, to the visible spectrum, to ultraviolet, to soft X-rays.
About International Linear Collider
The International Linear Collider (ILC) is a proposed linear particle accelerator. It is planned to have a collision energy of 500 GeV initially, and to be completed in the late 2010s. A later upgrade to 1000 GeV is possible. As of November 2007, the host country of the accelerator has not been chosen.
It will collide electrons with positrons. It will be between 30 km and 40 km long, more than 10 times as long as the 50 GeV Stanford Linear Accelerator, the longest existing linear particle accelerator.
There are two basic shapes of accelerators. Linear accelerators ("linacs"), such as the accelerator in SLAC and the ILC, accelerate the elementary particles along a straight path. Circular accelerators, such as Tevatron, LEP, and Large Hadron Collider (LHC), use a circular orbit. The circular geometry, in which counterrotating particle and antiparticle beams can be accelerated and collide multiple times, is preferred for hadron colliders, but is impractical for electron accelerators at the ILC energy scale, due to synchrotron radiation losses.
About Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) is a United States Department of Energy National Laboratory operated by Stanford University under the programmatic direction of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The SLAC research program centers on experimental and theoretical research in elementary particle physics using electron beams and a broad program of research in atomic and solid-state physics, chemistry, biology, and medicine using synchrotron radiation. The 3.2-kilometer (2.0-mile) long underground accelerator is the longest linear accelerator in the world, and is claimed to be "the world's straightest object." SLAC's meeting facilities also provided a venue for the homebrew computer club and other pioneers of the 1980s home computer revolution, and later SLAC hosted the first webpage in the U.S. The above-ground klystron gallery atop the beamline is the longest building in the United States.
Tags: budget cuts , Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) , Lee Lyons , Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) , X-ray free-electron laser , B-factory , International Linear Collider , Layoffs of 225 Employees ,
