US HEP Demography

Posted on February 18, 2008 by woit

Late last week there was a meeting of HEPAP in Washington, presentations available here. Several dealt with the current budget situation, which is basically that the current FY2008 budget is a disaster, and the Bush administration has proposed huge compensatory increases for FY2009. No one seems to have any idea what Congress will do or when, so the future for US government support of HEP is completely unclear not only for the long-term, but even for the next fiscal year, which starts in a few months.

The NSF presentation noted that NSF funding for particle physics theory was down 4% in FY2008, to about $14 million, of which roughly $1.5 million goes to the KITP at Santa Barbara. The critical issues for the NSF particle theory program were listed as:

  • Need to involve more people in LHC-related physics.
  • Need new hires in phenomenology.
  • Traditional funding sources for students (being TAs) is becoming problematic. (need more funding for students)

    • You can see why string theorists these days are pushing the idea of “string phenomenology” and claims that somehow string theory is relevant to the LHC.

    At the DOE, funding for theoretical particle physics was flat for FY2008, at $60 million, with a proposed 5% increase for FY2009.

    There was also an interesting presentation about an on-going project to gather demographic information on the people working in particle physics. I was surprised to see that statistics show significant recent increases at all levels in the numbers of people working in particle physics. From 2003-2007 the number of graduate students went from 1129 to 1335 (making one wonder why the NSF is worried about not supporting enough graduate students…), postdocs and untenured research staff from 1331 to 1406, untenured faculty from 228 to 284, and tenured faculty or staff from 1343 to 1355. In particle theory, the total number of people went from 1292 to 1414, so this increase in numbers was not all in experiment.

    Also worth reading is a presentation from Robert Sugar about the present state of Lattice QCD calculations.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

    LHC Startup News

    Posted on February 18, 2008 by woit

    I’m a bit confused about the situation with the LHC start-up schedule, maybe someone well-informed can help. Here’s what I’ve seen recently:

    At the AAAS meeting last Friday, there was a session on “Big Science”, which included discussion of the LHC with Robert Aymar, the CERN director general. Alan Boyle, at MSNBC, reports:

    June was the time frame Aymar had in mind when he was asked about the start-up schedule during a Friday session on large-scale science project. But during a follow-up chat, he pointed out that you can’t just press a big red button one day and expect each of the collider’s beams to hit full power of 7 trillion electron volts immediately…

    Aymar said that buildup could still start around May 21 or 22, with tests continuing for weeks after that. His aim is to have the collider conducting scientific experiments this summer.

    One thing that is definite about the schedule is that there will be a ceremonial inauguration of the machine on October 21, with a wide variety of dignitaries present, include French president Sarkozy.

    It’s not clear what phase of the start-up Aymar had in mind when he was referring to June, and the idea that the machine will be doing physics this summer seems hard to reconcile with information available publicly about how the things are progressing. For an official schedule from last August, see here. The current one, from October, is available here. Both schedules have beam commissioning beginning May 15, and taking about two months, so physics in July.

    The LHC is divided into 8 sectors, and each sector must go through a process of flushing, cooling down to 1.8 K (which takes a month and a half), and powering tests of the magnets. The powering tests are crucial to make sure that the magnets can quench safely, dissipating the energy contained in a magnet that leaves the superconducting state unexpectedly. According to the schedules, the powering tests should take 2-3 months, and can start only once the magnets are cool. So, from beginning of cooldown to the point that a sector is ready to try and use should be a process of about 4 months or so. So, for mid-May beam commissioning, all sectors should be cool by around now and starting powering tests soon.

    One can follow the actual state of affairs here. One sector (45) is cool and undergoing powering tests, but this sector still has not had its inner triplet magnets fixed, and the plan is to warm it back up before doing this, after which it will need to be cooled down again. Cooling of 3 other sectors has begun, but has been stopped in two of these to make repairs, with cooldown to resume in week 9 of the year for one sector, week 11 for another. Of the four other sectors, cooldown is supposed to start in one of them during week 15 (mid-April), dates are not given for the others. With respect to last August’s schedule, the current situation is roughly 4-5 months behind where it is supposed to be. This would suggest that, if all goes well from now on, beam commissioning would begin mid-September. Perhaps there was some slack in that schedule, and things could happen faster than planned, but I’m just not seeing how physics this summer is in the cards for the LHC. Most likely scenario seems to be a big push to get some a beam of some sort stored in the machine in time for October 21 and the big ceremony.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 2 Comments

    Late Night HEP TV

    Posted on February 13, 2008 by woit

    Particle physics is enjoying a wave of popularity on the late night talk shows this week. On Friday, MIT experimentalist Peter Fisher appeared on the Conan O’Brien show, helping O’Brien see how long he could keep his wedding ring spinning on his desk.

    Last night it was a theorist’s turn, with Lisa Randall appearing on the Colbert Report, promoting the idea of extra dimensions.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 22 Comments

    Quantum Field Theory, As Seen By Mathematicians

    Posted on February 11, 2008 by woit

    In recent years, interest in quantum field theory among mathematicians has gone through ups and downs, in a sub-field dependent manner, as ideas rooted in quantum field theory have turned out to be mathematically useful in a variety of contexts. At Berkeley, it appears that there’s now more interest in quantum field theory in the math department than in the physics department, so much so that last fall three senior faculty (Nicolai Reshetikhin, Peter Teichner and Richard Borcherds) offered courses on various QFT topics. Luckily, Berkeley graduate students seem to be very industrious, and they have accumulated quite a few tex-ed lecture notes from these and other courses, gathering together the QFT ones here and here.

    Another popular topic at Berkeley has been geometric Langlands, a subject where Witten’s QFT approach has intrigued many mathematicians. Witten has a new preprint aimed at mathematicians promoting the QFT point of view, and he explains in more detail claims he made in talks last fall that the use of 4d QFT corresponds in a sense to the use by mathematicians of “stacks”. Stacks are a mathematical device useful for handling non-free quotients, situations where one wants to keep track not just of the quotient space (which is often singular), but of more structure, for instance the varying stabilizer groups at different points of the quotient. Witten notes that if one just uses mirror symmetry of the Hitchin moduli space to study Langlands duality, one doesn’t know how to handle various singularities. Mathematicians have dealt with these singularities by invoking stacks, Witten instead argues that one should use a 4d gauge theory QFT perspective to see how to study the issue in a way that does not involve these singularities (they only appear when you dimensionally reduce and work with the 2d topological sigma models).

    Last week Witten gave a talk to the mathematicians at the IAS on “Duality from Six Dimensions”, which is to be continued this week. He explained how the existence of a 6d superconformal theory implies SL(2,Z) symmetry and thus duality (Montonen-Olive duality) in the 4d N=4 supersymmetric topological gauge theory he uses in his approach to geometric Langlands. This is an old story by now, from the mid-nineties duality days, and Witten wrote up some of it here, for his contribution to the proceedings of the conference in honor of Graeme Segal’s sixtieth birthday back in 2002. David Ben-Zvi was at the talk taking notes, and I hope he’ll be adding to his extensive collection of on-line notes this semester since he’ll be at the Institute attending this year’s program there.

    Note added: David has started posting his notes, the notes from the Witten talk are here.

    At MIT this semester there’s a “pre-Talbot” seminar being run that will lead up to a Talbot workshop in March. The topic is something that might be called “quantum geometric Langlands”, involving not Witten’s QFT ideas, but a version of geometric Langlands that uses quantum groups due to Dennis Gaitsgory and Jacob Lurie. Scott Carnahan discusses this at Secret Blogging Seminar, and has notes from his overview talk available.

    In March Lurie will be giving the Marston Morse lectures at the IAS, on the topic of “Topological Quantum Field Theories in Low Dimensions”.

    Posted in Favorite Old Posts, Uncategorized | 7 Comments

    Is Big Physics peddling science pornography?

    Posted on February 7, 2008 by woit

    There’s a new round of nonsense about theoretical physics making its way through the media, especially the British tabloids. The original source is a preprint from a few months ago by Aref’eva and Volovich entitled Time Machine at the LHC (it refers to another earlier one by other authors If LHC is a Mini-Time-Machines Factory, Can We Notice?). These papers discuss the possibility that the LHC will produce not just black holes, but also wormholes that would be “Mini-Time-Machines” (MTMs).

    New Scientist now has a cover story based on this which begins:

    As you may have heard, this will be the year. The Large Hadron Collider – the most powerful atom-smasher ever built – will be switched on, and particle physics will hit pay-dirt. Yet if a pair of Russian mathematicians are right, any advances in this area could be overshadowed by a truly extraordinary event. According to Irina Aref’eva and Igor Volovich, the LHC might just turn out to be the world’s first time machine.

    The article invokes work by Nima Arkani-Hamed and others to justify the idea that the LHC will produce black holes and possibly wormholes, and Kip Thorne to justify the possibility of time travel. Several physicists are quoted in favor of the plausibility of the underlying idea, it not its practicality.

    The story has now made it to the Sun, which has two stories: Time Travel Russia’s in and Visits From Crack to the Future. According to the Sun, the LHC will be switched on in May (not true….) and from that time on time travel will be possible:

    The laws of physics suggest that no one from the future will be able to travel back any further than when the machine was switched on — with 2008 being Year Zero.

    According to the Daily Mail:

    Time travel could be a reality within just three months, Russian mathematicians have claimed. They believe an experiment nuclear scientists plan to carry out in underground tunnels in Geneva in May could create a rift in the fabric of the universe.

    The Telegraph has Time travellers from the future ‘could be here in weeks’, but the article at least has some skeptical quotes, for instance from David Deutsch, who describes the idea as “not cranky”, but unlikely to work.

    New Scientist does seem to realize that this kind of silliness may have gone too far, publishing an article by Michael Hanlon entitled Is Big Science peddling science pornography?. I think Hanlon raises extremely important questions that the physics community needs to address, although he makes a mistake by pinning this on “Big Science”. The people working hard to make projects like the LHC a reality are not the culprits here, irresponsible theorists are. Hanlon writes:

    Physics and cosmology stories are like this these days. Once it was all hard sums and red-shifted galaxies; awesome enough one would have thought. Now it’s time machines and universe-eating particles.

    Does any of this bear any relation to reality? Or is Big Physics guilty of some serious sexing-up, drifting away from the realm of hard data and into the softer universe of science pornography?

    As well as accidental time machines we are told of cosmic strings – gigantic filaments of super-stuff that warp and tear space-time like ladders in a pair of celestial stockings – and crashing branes, titanic slabs of maths that give rise to the big bang in the exotically lovely ekpyrotic universe of Neil Turok.

    Not crazy enough for you? What about the multiverse? One of the biggest sell-out lectures at last year’s Hay-on-Wye festival in Wales starred the UK’s astronomer royal, Martin Rees, who entertained his audience with a discussion of the possibility, indeed the probability, of multiple worlds – endless parallel realities existing in a gargantuan super-reality that makes what we think of as the universe as insignificant as a gnat on an elephant’s backside. Or there’s the simulation argument, philosopher Nick Bostrom’s delicious idea that since it should be possible to replicate an entire universe in a computer, and that this could be done countless times, statistical cleverness proves that we are not the real McCoy but the figments of some electronic entity’s imagination.

    …Scientists, and people like me who stick up for science, are happy to pour scorn on astrologers, homeopaths, UFO-nutters, crop-circlers and indeed the Adam-and-Eve brigade, who all happily believe in six impossible things before breakfast with no evidence at all. Show us the data, we say to these deluded souls. Where are your trials? What about Occam’s razor – the principle that any explanation should be as simple as possible? The garden is surely beautiful enough, we say, without having to populate it with fairies.

    The danger is that on the wilder shores of physics these standards are often not met either. There is as yet no observational evidence for cosmic strings. It’s hard to test for a multiverse. In this sense, some of these ideas are not so far, conceptually, from UFOs and homeopathy. If we are prepared to dismiss ghosts, say, as ludicrous on the grounds that firstly we have no proper observational evidence for them and secondly that their existence would force us to rethink everything, doesn’t the same argument apply to simulated universes and time machines? Are we not guilty of prejudice against some kinds of very unlikely ideas in favour of others?

    Update: The time travel story has even made it to the Chronicle.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 46 Comments

    Worth Reading

    Posted on February 6, 2008 by woit

    The latest issue of the Cern Courier contains a wonderful article entitled From BCS to the LHC by Steven Weinberg. It is based on a talk he gave at a recent conference celebrating the 50th anniversary of the BCS theory of superconductivity, and explains the relation between electroweak symmetry breaking and superconductivity, by way of telling about some of the history, in which he played a central role.

    From the Mathematical Intelligencer, there’s an excellent review by Leila Schneps of a book which contains much of the correspondence over the years between two of the greatest mathematicians of the last century, Grothendieck and Serre. The review covers not just the mathematics, but also the very different personal styles that were part of what was such a fruitful interaction. She refers to the existence of “a much larger collection of existing letters” from the later period in his life when he had begun to stop regularly doing mathematics which are still unpublished, one of which answers Serre’s question about why his mathematical research program had come to a halt. She ends with the summary:

    In some sense, the difference between them might be expressed by saying that Serre devoted his life to the pursuit of beauty, Grothendieck to the pursuit of truth.

    Barry Mazur has a new article giving his very personal take on the philosophy of mathematics: Mathematical Platonism and its Opposites.

    MSRI celebrated its 25th Anniversary last week, and Dan Freed gave a talk on Chern-Simons-Witten theory (slides here). He is careful to put a warning label in red on the standard path integral definition of the theory, writing “this path integral is only a motivating heuristic”. Together with collaborators Mike Hopkins and Constantin Teleman he has been working on coming up with a very abstract definition of the theory, far removed from the path integral, but at the end he notes that in the stationary phase approximation one can make sense of the path integral, putting up a page from one of his old papers where this was shown calculationally.

    The latest Physics Today has a long article about the disastrous budget situation for HEP in FY2008. The politics of this are described as follows:

    Congress and the administration took turns blaming each other for the bad news. The omnibus bill “turned its back on Congress’s concern for competitiveness,” Marburger said, by wiping out most of the increases for science and technology that had received strong bipartisan support in the America COMPETES Act, which was signed into law in August 2007.

    But the White House was hardly without fault. Bush’s 11th-hour refusal to negotiate with Democrats on a spending ceiling he had imposed forced lawmakers in the dead of night to trim back spending bills that had been assembled and approved in a far more thoughtful process. In doing so, they unsurprisingly took their red pen to presidential priorities. The increases for the physical sciences were part of Bush’s American Competitiveness Initiative to revitalize US technological leadership. Marburger said he had little doubt that Congress has deliberately chosen the science programs for the budget-cutting scissors.

    Ironically, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) “Innovation Agenda” proposed to double nondefense R&D spending over 10 years. Admitting that funding levels this year fall short of the 7% annual increases needed to meet the goal, Pelosi assured the scientific community in a letter that her commitment to growing the physical sciences budgets “remains strong and steadfast.”

    In the Chicago Tribune, Fermilab director Oddone describes what he thinks about the budget process. He now has to fire 200 people, while a huge budget increase is proposed by the administration, which the Congress probably won’t act on until deep into the next fiscal year, with no indication now of what they will do:

    This is not the way a developed country manages a scientific enterprise… It’s more like a banana republic.

    Update: One more. A popular talk by Richard Taylor about reciprocity laws and density theorems (such as Sato-Tate) in number theory.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

    This Week’s Hype

    Posted on February 6, 2008 by woit

    This week’s media hype promoting a new observational test of extra dimensions is based on the recent arXiv preprint Transient Pulses from Exploding Primordial Black Holes as a Signature of an Extra Dimension. Stories about it have appeared already in Nature and in New Scientist.

    Some of the authors are part of a group at Virginia Tech that is working with a radio-telescope array they call the Eight-meter-wavelength Transient Array (ETA). The possible astrophysical sources they are looking for include primordial black holes. The press articles however, aren’t about this, but about the new preprint, which makes claims not about conventional primordial black holes, but about ones involving extra dimensions:

    For a toroidally compactified extra dimension, transient radio-pulse searches probe the electroweak energy scale (∼0.1 TeV), enabling comparison with the Large Hadron Collider. The enormous challenges of detecting quantum gravitational effects, and exploring electroweak-scale physics, make this a particularly attractive possibility.

    In the New Scientist piece, astrophysicist Avi Loeb makes the comment:

    There are a lot of layers here of nonstandard assumptions… If nothing could be observed in this context, then it would not surprise me.

    According to the ETA web-site and the New Scientist article, as far as the extra-dimensional business is concerned, the project is led not by the faculty members involved, but by first author Mike Kavic, a graduate student in the department. Unlike most recent examples of such hype, which appeared in conjunction with the acceptance or publication of a paper in PRL, this one is based solely upon the submission of a paper to PRL.

    Posted in This Week's Hype | 6 Comments

    Microsoft Research New England

    Posted on February 4, 2008 by woit

    Microsoft announced today that they’ll be opening a new research lab, in Cambridge, which will be called Microsoft Research New England. The director of the lab will be mathematical physicist Jennifer Chayes, with deputy director her husband Christian Borgs, who is also a mathematical physicist. For an interview with them, see here, for a story in today’s New York Times, see here.

    Jennifer and her ex-husband Lincoln Chayes (also a mathematical physicist, now at UCLA) were my class-mates during graduate student years in Princeton, as well as frequent companions on trips down to City Gardens in Trenton to see bands like the Ramones. The two of them at the time had even more impressive leather outfits than the Ramones.

    Update: There’s more about this at the Xconomy web-site.

    Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

    Steinhardt: The Anthropic Landscape Has Run Its Course

    Posted on February 3, 2008 by woit

    Over at John Horgan’s blog, he quotes an e-mail from Princeton cosmologist Paul Steinhardt, who corrects Horgan’s account of a recent conversation between them, writing

    I said that I thought that the idea of a string landscape and the notion of anthropic selection had run its course. I think it is too early to give up on string theory.

    While Steinhardt sees anthropic selection of our universe out of a multiverse as an idea that has run its course and is on its way out, it’s still quite popular in certain quarters. The Templeton Foundation, through the FQXI organization, is a major source of funding for anthropic multiverse research. FQXI’s web-site has a new story up entitled Philosophy of the Multiverse, which asks “On what side of the borderline between science and philosophy are multiverses?” The writer evidently couldn’t locate anyone to take the “it’s philosophy, not science” side of the argument, quoting Sean Carroll, Anthony Aguirre, Alexander Vilenkin and Aurelien Barrau as supporters of anthropics as science. Barrau suggests that we may need to change the definition of science to accomodate the multiverse.

    Whatever Steinhardt says, at least the Mormons are getting on the multiverse bandwagon, with their journal Dialogue recently publishing a long article entitled Eternal Progression in a Multiverse: An Explorative Mormon Cosmology. The article begins:

    This article is an examination of the Mormon doctrine of eternal progression within the context of big-bang cosmology, a description of a finite universe that appears to contradict that doctrine. I argue that a multiverse cosmology, a theory that posits a multiplicity of universes, resolves many of the problems posed by big-bang cosmology.

    and goes on to explain how the multiverse agrees well with the doctriine of “eternal progression” in Mormon theology:

    In a Mormon multiverse cosmology, God does indeed manifest his infinite creative prowess in the respect that God (any god along the infinite chain of gods) creates children, some of whom progress to become gods, who in turn create their own universes and children, some of whom progress to become gods, and so on, forever. Each universe in the ensemble of universes becomes an extension and continuation of the creativity of every “ancestral god” in an eternal family of deities. The creativity and glory of each god increases exponentially with the production of new universes. In this cosmology, the multiverse is a hallmark and witness of the infinite work and glory of God and the dwelling place for an infinite number of eternal progressing beings.

    While solving the problem of justifying eternal progression, the multiverse idea leads to all sorts of new possible research directions:

    In a Mormon multiverse cosmology, many questions remain open. Are there communication and movement of the gods and other premortal and postmortal beings between universes? When a universe experiences a big crunch or big freeze, does the god of that universe generate a new universe or “relocate” to another universe fit for carrying out the “great plan of happiness” for a new household of spirit children? Did God, our Father in Heaven, achieve godhood in this universe or a prior one? If God was exalted in a prior universe, how many universes has he governed? Jesus Christ is the redeemer for this universe, but is he the redeemer for others? Are some universes “stillborn” in the sense that they do not have the required values of the physical constants for a universe capable of sustaining life? Because the multiverse is infinite, are there replicas of us in other universes as postulated by the replication paradox? Cosmologists speculate whether the physical laws are the same across the ensemble of universes, but what about the spiritual laws? Are the spiritual laws “multiversal” or just “universal”? As multiverse cosmologies develop scientifically, these questions and others will stimulate much discussion.

    The author ends the piece with a quote from Andrei Linde: “Universes can have babies — it’s nice.”

    Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments

    US HEP News

    Posted on February 1, 2008 by woit

    Today and yesterday at Fermilab there is an HEPAP meeting designed to gather information necessary to prioritize decisions on how to spend the US HEP budget over the next few years. Many of the talks there are on-line and give a good idea of what future possibilities look like. The main issues being discussed are:

  • Whether to go ahead with project X at Fermilab, a proposal for a high-intensity proton source.
  • The state of the ILC project, given that it was zeroed out in this year’s US and UK budgets. Barry Barish emphasizes the continuing goal of being ready to make a decision about whether to build such a thing soon after LHC results arrive, presumably starting in 2010. The state of CLIC and other multi-TeV lepton collider possibilities is reviewed by Tor Raubenheimer of SLAC, who puts a likely date for a multi-TeV electron collider at 2030-40, a muon collider after 2050. These things are a long ways away…
  • Whether to run the Tevatron in FY 2010, with presentations about how the Tevatron is currently performing, and from CDF and D0 advocating for a run past FY2009. Both experiments make the case that they are getting close to being able to either see evidence of the Higgs or rule out its existence over most of the expected mass range. More about this from Tommaso Dorigo of CDF here. Since the Tevatron is about the most successful and exciting thing going on in US HEP, I personally don’t see the case for planning on shutting it down until solid results are in from the LHC about the Higgs, which should be sometime in FY2010 at the earliest. Who knows, maybe the LHC will see something that the Tevatron is a good tool to study further. Seems more likely than that it will see black holes…

    • The involuntary furloughs of Fermilab employees begin today. No news regarding the supposed efforts by the Illinois Congressional delegation to lobby for a supplemental appropriation to keep Fermilab from having to layoff around 200 people. At least one of the relevant people is undoubtedly too busy with other things to pay attention to this. The Congress and the White House are negotiating an emergency bill to deal with the recession and job losses that have started recently. Since government spending is bad and tax cuts are good, their plan seems to be to continue to throw people out of their jobs with budget cuts in HEP and elsewhere, while handing out cash to as many voters as possible.

    For a presentation by DOE Undersecretary Orbach about the DOE budget problem, see here, and analysis from Richard Jones of the AIP here. The FY 2009 budget request from the White House will come out on Monday, and Orbach promises that

    The President’s request for FY 09 will be wonderful, again, for the physical sciences. While I can’t go into details here, I can say that it will continue the funding request consistent with the American Competitiveness Initiative and the America COMPETES Act. The problem for all of us is that, faced with essentially flat funding for the physical sciences in FY 08, the President’s Request for FY 09 will appear as a very large percentage increase for the three ACI agencies. The danger is that basic research in the physical sciences will again be ‘donors’ to other programs.

    meaning I guess that Congress will be tempted to strip these out in order to fund other things.

    Gordon Watts notices that in Bush’s State of the Union speech he explicitly advocated increased funding for basic physical science research, something which is extremely unusual in such a speech:

    Last year Congress passed legislation supporting the American Competitiveness Initiative, but never followed through with the funding. This funding is essential to keeping our scientific edge. So I ask Congress to double federal support for critical basic research in the physical sciences and ensure America remains the most dynamic nation on earth.

    The physics community seems to have done a great job of convincing the administration to support basic physics research in general and HEP in particular, which normally would be a very good thing. But the same was true last year, and it seems to just have had the effect of painting a big fat bullseye on HEP funding for someone in Congress looking for a place to cut. At least this year people are aware of what might be coming, and maybe something can be done to head off a repeat of this year’s disaster.

    The general budget politics don’t look favorable at all though, with the Bush Administration evidently proposing to heavily cut Medicare and Medicaid spending. Congress has very different priorities, and it seems all too likely that they will fund restoration of the health-care cuts by cutting things like the DOE basic research budget. This fall will be different though, with a new Congress and president elected at the beginning of November, but not taking office until January. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the government run on a continuing resolution at FY2008 levels until after a new president takes office.

    Update: The proposed FY2009 budget is out, DOE here, NSF here. The DOE budget contains a huge increase for HEP, from $688 million in FY2008 to $805 million in FY2009. The NSF budget doesn’t break out the HEP component, but the total budget for math and physics is supposed to go from $1167 million in FY2008 to $1403 million in FY2009. These are huge and very healthy proposed increases, but unfortunately it is not at all clear that they will actually make it into the final budget.

    Update: There’s a story today in the New York Times about this. Also a message from the Fermilab director, saying he has no choice but to go ahead with the plan to start laying off employees of the lab. In practical terms, the proposed budget increases appear to be meaningless, with the likely situation no increase at all in FY2009 of any kind until a budget gets passed, which most likely will not happen until already deep into the fiscal years. He writes:

    …every Washington expert tells me to prepare for a continuing resolution that might last into the new administration. Such a continuing resolution would extend the present difficult budgets well into FY09. At the same time, relief in FY08 in the form of a supplemental appropriation is not guaranteed and is at best several months away.

    Posted in Experimental HEP News | 5 Comments