STFC Funding Crisis : Particle Physics

Last Updated : 03 Nov 2008 at 10:08:35
This page is intended as a conduit of information about the STFC funding deficit to the particle physics community. It includes briefing material that can be used in lobbying, presentations/notes from the various community and town meetings, letters written to MPs, press releases, press coverage and links to other parallel campaigns.

If you have anything you'd like to be included on this page - additional press, lobbying material etc then please send it to (markl AT hep.ucl.ac.uk and m.green AT rhul.ac.uk). Some of the material is password protected - please email markl AT hep.ucl.ac.uk for the username & password.

Latest News

Press Coverage - most recent first

Material Released under FOI

Requests have been made to both DIUS and STFC by various members of the particle physics and astronomy communties to release documents related to the CSR submission, STFC's space infrastructure plans, the formulation of the priorities in the delivery plan and the programmatic review.

Briefing Material

Meetings

Presentations & Notes from Nov 23rd Meeting @ UCL

Dec 13th STFC Town Meeting

Dec 14th Cern Council Meeting

Letters / Meetings With MPs & VCs

Other Campaigns / Groups

Press Releases

The Wakeham Review of Physics

IUS Select Committee Meetings

Two edvidence sessions have taken place and a third will take place on Feb 27. First Session Heard evidence from IoP,RAS,Prospect, RCUK & STFC on Jan-21.
The proceedings are viewable here and the transcript is here .
The IoP reaction to the Jan-21 select committee is here
Statements and evidence submitted:

The PP community provided various documents to brief MPs on and outside the SC:

Second Session
Was preceeded by visits to RAL, ATC and DL. A report of the RAL visit is here . It took place on Feb-20 and heard evidence from Keith O'Nions and Ian Pearson. Proceedings can be streamed from Parliament TV ; or downloaded as a scrollable MP3 from here
The transcript is here

Third Session
Took place on Wed Feb 27 at 9:30. Evidence was heard from Swapan Chattopadhyay, Richard Holdaway, Keith Mason and Peter Warry. The audio proceedings can be streamed from Parliament TV ; or downloaded as a scrollable MP3 from here
The transcript is here .

US Funding

Three months into the US financial year the FY08 budget was made public on Dec-18. The overall DOE science budget is up only 2.4%. The NSF increase is also only 2.5% compared to Presidential/Senate/House requests for a 10% increase. The HEP allocation of $696M is $90M less than the President's FY08 budget request of $782M and almost $60M below the actual FY07 allocation ($752M). The allocation made zero provision for NOVA against a planned budget of $30M. The ILC(+SCRF) was allocated only $15M(+$5M) from a request of $60M(+$20M). Additionally no provision was made for the US to make its $120M contribution to ITER. The ILC implications are discussed by Barry Barish and the impact on FNAL is discussed here which also contains a link to Pier Oddone's FNAL address and daily udpdates including a statement of support from Barack Obama .

A letter in support of US HEP has been written and signed by group leaders from the UK and sent to Secretary of State Bodman. We received many letters of support from the US in response to the STFC delivery plan announcement. Todd Huffman has also sent a second letter signed by UK FNAL users. The DOE has announced the premature termination of the SLAC B-factory. See also the statement from SLAC
Ray Orbach comments on the cuts here

Other material