Related press releases
Related research
Physicists and Astronomers are now Finding they do not have Enough Money to Make Best use of Particle-Physics Laboratory
:: 14 January, 2008
Isaac Newton, besides being the founder of modern physics, was also master of Britain’s mint. That is a precedent which many British physicists must surely wish had become traditional. At the moment, money for physics is in short supply in Britain. Having spent a lot of cash in recent years, physicists and astronomers are now finding they do not have enough money to use the very facilities they paid to have built.
On December 14th, for example, the British delegation to CERN, Europe’s biggest particle-physics laboratory, abstained from a vote to increase the budget to make best use of the Large Hadron Collider. A vote for a rise, British delegates said, would be a vote for job losses elsewhere in physics. The budget was carried nonetheless and Britain is obliged to pay up. Perhaps not coincidentally, the country’s government had announced a few days earlier that it would withdraw from the International Linear Collider (ILC), an $8 billion project to build the successor to CERN’s new toy. Since America seems almost certain to cut its ILC budget, too, this project looks to be in trouble.
Public funding for research in both particle physics and astronomy used to be handled separately from other bits of physics, as did the building and running of big British-based experiments. On April 1st 2007 these areas were brought together by the formation of the Science and Technology Facilities Council. The result has been that when a relatively mundane particle accelerator called the Diamond Light Source, in Oxfordshire, proved to be some $160 million more expensive than expected, the axe had to fall on other parts of physics.
The cuts in particle physics are, at least, to future spending. Britain’s astronomers are having their current expenditure cut. They can no longer use one of the twin Gemini telescopes, based on Hawaii and in Chile, that British money helped pay for. British membership of telescopes in the Isaac Newton Group on the Canary Islands has also been cancelled, as has British involvement in ground-based studies of the sun.
The government’s response to the outcry has been as predictable as the scientists’ call for more money. It has announced a review of funding of physics. For their part, researchers hope the budget will not fall like Newton’s apple did.
Note for Large Hadron Collider
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle accelerator and collider located at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland (46°14′N, 6°03′E). Currently under construction, the LHC is scheduled to begin operation in May 2008. The LHC is expected to become the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. The LHC is being funded and built in collaboration with over two thousand physicists from thirty-four countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.
When activated, it is hoped that the collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and 'missing links' in the Standard Model of physics, and explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory which seeks to unify three of the four fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. The Higgs boson may also help to explain why the remaining force, gravitation, is so weak compared to the other three forces.
The collider is contained in a circular tunnel with a circumference of 26.659 kilometres (16.5 miles), at a depth ranging from 50 to 175 metres underground. The tunnel was formerly used to house the LEP, an electron-positron collider.
The 3.8 metre diameter, concrete-lined tunnel actually crosses the border between Switzerland and France at four points, although the majority of its length is inside France. The collider itself is located underground, with many surface buildings holding ancillary equipment such as compressors, ventilation equipment, control electronics and refrigeration plants.
About Diamond Light Source
Diamond Light Source is a synchrotron research facility located in Oxfordshire, England. It produced its first user beam towards the end of January 2007. Diamond will be used to probe the structure and properties of many types of materials and complex structures like proteins — information that will be used by a wide range of scientists.
The Diamond Light Source is a scientific research facility built at a cost of £260m on the site of the Science and Technology Facilities Council Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, at Harwell/Chilton near Didcot in Oxfordshire, UK. It came into operation in January 2007 and was formally opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 19th October 2007. Established in March 2002, Diamond Light Source Ltd is a joint venture company funded by the UK Government via the Science and Technology Facilities Council, and by the Wellcome Trust in a ratio of 86%:14% respectively. The construction of the building and the synchrotron tunnel was undertaken by Costain Ltd.
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.
Tags: Isaac Newton , modern physics , physicists , astronomers , CERN , particle-physics laboratory , Large Hadron Collider , Gemini telescopes , ,
