Washington

US physicists are hitting out hard at the Bush administration's budget proposal for next year. They claim that the plan, which would cut overall spending on research in physics by about 4%, will imperil the country's global leadership in the discipline.

“If these cuts stand,” says Tom Ludlam, a physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state, “there will be a significant reduction in the number of PhD scientists, graduate students, postdocs and senior scientists doing physics here in America.”

The Department of Energy's Office of Science, which funds most US physics research, formulated a plan in November 2003 to construct or upgrade 28 different facilities over the next 20 years. Physicists say that the proposed budget will prevent the plan from being implemented.

If approved by Congress, the budget request would support some of the facilities, including construction of the Linac Coherent Light Source at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California. But it would cancel or delay several other projects that the plan identified as priorities.

For instance, the budget would cancel the BTeV experiment, which aims to use the Tevatron collider at Fermilab, Chicago, to investigate the imbalance between matter and antimatter in the Universe. The experiment received a top ranking in the 2003 plan. “This is quite a blow to us,” says project director Joel Butler. “Everything was in place,” he adds. “We were more than ready to go.”

The science-office budget has been essentially flat since 2001, but Raymond Orbach, head of the energy department's science office, defends the 2006 proposal. “I'm very happy with the structure of the budget,” he says. “It enables us to maintain scientific leadership on a global scale.”

Martha Krebs, a consultant in Los Angeles who ran the science office under Bill Clinton, says the budget reveals the areas in which the Bush administration wants to “be a leader”. She says that nuclear physics, in particular, does not seem to be one of these.

The 2006 nuclear-physics request for US$371 million is 8% less than this year's budget. Brookhaven and the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, would bear the brunt of the cut. At the Jefferson lab, a plan to double the energy of the laboratory's continuous electron beam — also ranked highly in the 2003 plan — would be deferred. In addition, the electron beam's operating hours would be cut by almost one-third.

At Brookhaven, the cut would decrease operating hours at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider — the laboratory's main nuclear-physics facility — by almost two-thirds. “It's not a good situation,” says Rick Casten, a physicist at Yale University and chairman of the Nuclear Science Advisory Committee. “We're going to lose our competitiveness if this keeps up and is not reversed.”