Washington

The Department of Energy's Office of Science, which supports major research facilities across the country and is the United States' main sponsor of physics research, will receive no increase at all to its $3.3-billion budget under President Bush's 2003 proposal.

Several programmes will be curtailed as a result of the funding freeze. In high-energy physics, for example, extra resources to upgrade the Tevatron at Fermilab, near Chicago, will come at the cost of closing down a fixed-target experiment at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state.

The proposed halting of this experiment has alarmed Brookhaven officials. “We had been promised running of the experiment at least through 2003, and now we wake up to find that they've just taken it away,” says Thomas Kirk, an associate director at the laboratory. “It's a very serious blow to our high-energy physics programme.”

But John Marburger, the former Brookhaven director who now serves as Bush's science adviser, defends the emphasis on the Tevatron, which he says has a “window of opportunity” to search for the Higgs boson before Europe's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) begins operating in 2007. “Maybe they'll find it before the LHC switches on,” he says.

Under the proposal, biological and environmental research at the energy department will decline sharply, from $570 million this year to $504 million next year, although department officials say that many of the cuts will affect projects that had been “earmarked” by Congress this year.

One bright spot in the Office of Science's proposal is $45 million in new funding for four nanotechnology research centres, the first of which will be built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Although non-military science programmes at the Department of Energy will suffer, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which runs the department's nuclear-weapons research laboratories, will see its budget grow by 6% to more than $8 billion.