Impact of Physics on the Economy

 It is not know if the public is aware of the economic impact of physics, not just in terms of industry to support the workings of physics, but also how new ideas and technologies have sprung new innovations and devices that made our world the way it is today. Of course, the most obvious example would be the invention of the solid state transistor, which is the heart of every modern electronic devices that we have now.

This Swiss study tries to quantify the impact of physics on the Swiss economy. One can clearly see the breath of the impact across many different disciplines and sector of the economy.

This is not that much different than the previous similar studies that were done for the US economy and for Europe. The significant conclusion one can draw out of these data is that one gets a lot of returns for the initial investment. But it is not just that. If one looks at the nature of the returns, many of them are vital to the advancement of our civilization, so these investments are important not merely for financial reasons.

BTW, I still encounter people (a few of them my students) who are surprised that physics has anything to do with their smarphones.

Zz.

The Future of CMB Exploration

You would think that once the cosmic microwave background (CMB) has been discovered and studied, that was the end of it. That is not how science typically works, especially on something that has such a rich amount of information as the CMB.

This article reports on the next proposed major research effort in the US in further studying the CMB and refining the measurements that we currently have. The article gives you a good over view of what we currently know about the CMB, what we wish to extract out of it, and how it can be done. This appears to be a joint effort between two major science funding agencies in the US: the US Dept. of Energy and the US National Science Foundation, and will have an estimated cost of $650 million.

As someone who likes to include contemporary and most recent relevant news into my lessons, this will be another item that I will include in my Intro to Astronomy class.

Z.

US No Longer Attracts The Best Physics Minds

So much for making America great again.

Ethan Siegel summarizes the recent data on the severe drop in the number of international students seeking advanced physics degree in the US, and the drop in the number of applicants to US schools.

You need to read the article and the history of US advancement in physics, and science in general, to realize why this is a troubling trend. Whether you realize it or not, what you are enjoying now is the result of many such immigrants who came to the US and made extraordinary discoveries and contribution to science. This may no longer be true soon enough.

Yet, according to the American Physical Society, the past year has seen an alarming, unprecedented drop in the number of international applications to physics PhD programs in the United States. In an extremely large survey of 49 of the largest physics departments in the country, representing 41% of all enrolled physics graduate students in the United States, an overall decrease of almost 12% in the number of international applicants was observed from 2017 to 2018.

Graduate students in physics, if you are not aware of it, are the workhorse in advanced physics research. While senior researchers often think of the project, find the funding, and form the group, it is the graduate students and postdoc that often are the ones doing the actual work and executing the plan. And many of us not only rely on their skills and knowledge, but also their creativity in solving the myriads of problems that we often did not anticipate during the research work.

Without graduate students, many research programs would either come to a halt, or will be severely impacted. Period!

And the reality here is that the overwhelming majority of US institutions, both universities and US National Labs, have come to depend on a lot of international graduate students for these research projects. The ability to attract not just the best talent in the US, but also the best talent from all over the world, was a luxury that was the envy of many other countries. But that is no longer the case now, and the gloomy prediction of the beginning of the decline isn't that outrageous.

We find ourselves, today, at the very beginning of what could be the end of America's greatness in the realm of scientific research and education. Science has always been touted as the great equalizer: the scientific truths underlying our Universe know no borders and do not discriminate based on race, gender, or religion. We still have time to reverse this trend, and to welcome the brightest minds the world has to offer into our country.

But if we fail to do so, that intellectual capital will thrive elsewhere, leaving America behind. If we do not change course, "America First" will be the downfall of scientific greatness in our country.

I said as much way back in 2012 when I started noticing for the first time of many established Chinese researchers and college professors starting to migrate back to China and to Chinese institutions, something that was unheard of several years before. So now, compounding the budget constraints, we now have clear data on US no longer attracting as many international students as before.

There are no "greatness" in any of these here.

Zz.

US National Academies Endorse Building Electron-Ion Collider

The US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have endorsed the building of an electron-ion collider in the US as the top priority for the nuclear physics community. The detailed report on the building and science of such facility can be found here.

An EIC slams electrons into protons or heavier ions to investigate the quarks and gluons inside the nucleons. A collider with high energy and luminosity—a measure of the rate at which particle collisions occur—would have the fine resolution needed to answer some of the big-picture questions cited by the committee. Those include elucidating the origin of the mass and spin of nucleons, learning how gluons hold nuclei together, and determining whether emergent forms of matter made of dense gluons exist.

Beyond nuclear science, an EIC would benefit astrophysics, high-energy physics, accelerator physics, and theoretical and computational modeling, the committee writes. Further, it is the only high-energy accelerator (excluding light sources) being considered for construction in the nation, and building it would help to maintain US expertise in accelerator and collider science. “An EIC would be a unique facility in the world and would maintain US leadership in nuclear physics,” the report states. Although there is no existing EIC, China is also considering building one.

While this facility has the word "collider" attached to it, this is not a high-energy physics facility nor will it be funded out of the high-energy physics directorate of the DOE and NSF. It will be a nuclear physics facility, just like RHIC, CEBAF, and the upcoming FRIB.

Now, if only the politicians in Washington can be convinced of the need to build such a thing... y'know, make America "great" again, even though we no longer have any high-energy physics collider on US soil.

Zz.

Forum with Congressman and Physicist Bill Foster

This is the talk given by Congressman and the only Physicist left in the US Congress, Bill Foster, at this year's APS March meeting.



I have been in attendance to one of Bill Foster's talk before, at the 2011 TIPP conference in Chicago. You may read my "live" reporting of that talk back then, and also a follow-up post on it.

Zz.

The US 2017 Omnibus Budget

Finally, the US Congress has a 2017 budget, and this is the time that I'm glad they didn't follow the disastrous budget proposal of Donald Trump. Both NSF and DOE Office of Science didn't fare badly, with NSF doing worse than I expected. Still, what a surprise to see an increase in funding for HEP after years of neglect and budget cuts.

The Office of Science supports six research programs, and there were winners and losers among them. On the plus side, advanced scientific computing research, which funds much of DOE's supercomputing capabilities, gets a 4.2% increase to $647 million. High energy physics gets a boost of 3.8% to $825 million. Basic energy sciences, which funds work in chemistry, material science, and condensed matter physics and runs most of DOE's large user facilities, gets a bump up of 1.2% to $1.872 billion. Nuclear physics gets a 0.8% raise to $622 million; biological and environmental research inches up 0.5% to $612 million. In contrast, the fusion energy sciences program sees its budget fall a whopping 13.2% to $380 million.

It will continue to be challenging for physics funding during the next foreseeable future, but at least this will not cause a major panic. I've been highly critical of the US Congress on many issues, but I will tip my hat to them this time for standing up to the ridiculous budget that came out of the Trump administration earlier.

Zz.

Earth Day 2017 - March For Science Day

Today is the March for Science day to coincide with Earth Day 2017.

Unfortunately, I will not be participating in it, because I'm flying off to start my vacation. However, I have the March for Science t-shirt, and will be wearing it all day. So I may not be with all of you who will be participating it in today, but I'll be there in spirit.

And yes, I have written to my elected officials in Washington DC to let them know how devastating the Trump budget proposal is to science and the economic future of this country. Unfortunately, I may be preaching to the choir, because all 3 of them (2 Senators and 1 Representative of my district) are all Democrats who I expect to oppose the Trump budget as it is anyway.

Anyhow, to those of you who will be marching, YOU GO, BOYS AND GIRLS!

Zz.

DOE's Office Of Science Faces Disastrous Cuts

The first Trump budget proposal presents a major disaster for scientific funding and especially to DOE Office of Science budget.

President Donald Trump's first budget request to Congress, to be released at 7 a.m. Thursday, will call for cutting the 2018 budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by $6 billion, or nearly 20%, according to sources familiar with the proposal. The Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Science would lose $900 million, or nearly 20% of its $5 billion budget. The proposal also calls for deep cuts to the research programs at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and a 5% cut to NASA's earth science budget. And it would eliminate DOE's roughly $300 million Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

I don't know in what sense this will make America "great again". It is certainly not in science, that's for sure.

Zz.

APS Endorses March Of Science

The American Physical Society has unanimously endorsed the upcoming March for Science.

I'll be flying out of town on that exact day of the March, so I had decided a while back to simply contribute to it. I get the sentiment and the mission. However, I'm skeptical on the degree of impact that it will make. It will get publicity, and maybe focuses some of the issues, especially funding in the physical sciences, to the public.

But for it to take hold, it can't simply be a one-day event, and as much as I've involved myself in many outreach programs, I still see a lot of misinformation and ignorance among the public about science, and physics in particular.

Here's something I've always wanted to do, but never followed through and lack the resources to do it. How about we do something similar to a family tree genealogy. But instead of tracing human ancestors, we focus on technology "family tree". I've always wanted to start with the iPhone capacitive touch screen. Trace back up the technology and scientific roots of this component. I bet you there were a lot of various material science, engineering, and physics that were part of various patents, published papers, etc. that eventually gave birth to this touch screen.

What it will do is show the public that what they have so gotten used to came out of very basic research in physics and engineering. We can even list out all the funding agencies that were part of the direct line of "descendants" of the device and show them how money spent on basic science actually became a major component of our economy.

By doing this, you don't beat around the bush. You TELL the public what they can actually get out of an investment in science with a concrete example. And it may come out of areas that they never made connection before.

Zz.

Politics And How It Affects US Physics Research

This is a very poignant article on how politics have impacted Physics research in the US for the past decade or so. Reading this can be very disheartening, so be forewarned!

The one impact that I had mentioned a few years ago is also mentioned here, and that had to do with not only the impact of budget cuts, but also the devastating impact of a budget cut AFTER several months of continuing resolution of the US budget.

I remember one year on December first, we had a faculty meeting where we heard funding levels would be up 10% across the board — a miraculous state of affairs after multiple years of flat-flat budgets (meaning no budgetary increases for cost of living adjustments — which ultimately means it’s a 3% cut). At our next faculty meeting on December fifteenth, we heard that it was going to be a flat-flat year — par for the course. On December nineteenth, we hear the news that there was a 30% cut in funding levels.

Now losing 30% of your budget is very bad in all circumstances, but you have to remember that the fiscal year begins on October first. The only thing you can do is fire people since all the funding is salaries and to do that legally takes about six weeks and with the holiday shutdown, that meant that this was a 50% cut in that year’s funding. There was some carry-forward and other budgetary manipulations, but 30% of the lab was lost, about three or four hundred if I recall. The lab tried to shield career scientists and engineers, but still many dozens were let go.

In a post from a few years ago, I showed the simple mathematics on why this effect is devastating for science research.

Unfortunately, I don't see this changing anytime soon. As the author of this article wrote, science in general does not have a "constituent". No politician pays a political price for not funding science, or wanting funding for science to be cut, unlike cutting funding for social programs, military, or other entitlements.

Regardless of who is in office or who is in control of the US Congress, it is business as usual.

Zz.

Happy New Year!

A belated Happy New Year to everyone. I hope you all had a great holiday season.

Those of us in the US are facing a rather uncertain next few months. With the new administration taking office and the issue of science and science funding being trivialized during this last presidential election, no one knows where things are going. With Rick Perry slated to be nominated as the Secretary for the Dept. of Energy, it is like having the wolf looking after the sheep, since he had stated on more than one occasion of abolishing this part of the US govt. Sorry, but I don't think he has a clue what the DOE actually does.

This is not the first time someone who has no expertise in STEM is heading a dept. that deals with STEM. I've always wondered about the logic and rational of doing that. You never seen someone who is not an expert in finance or economics heading, say, the Treasury! So why is the DOE, which has been a significant engine in research, science, and technology, and which is the area that has been attributed to be responsible for the significant growth in our economy, being relegated as an ugly stepchild? Is it because STEM and STEM funding does not have a built-in constituent that will make public and political noise?

At this point, I have very low expectations for a lot of things during these next few years.

Zz.

Who Will Host The Next LHC?

Nature has an interesting article on the issues surrounding the politics, funding, and physics in building the next giant particle collider beyond the LHC.

The Japanese are the front-runner to host the ILC, but the Chinese have their own plans on a circular electron-positron collider that can be upgraded to a future proton-proton collider.

And of course, all of these will require quite a bit of chump change to fund, and will be an international collaboration.

The climate in the US continues to be very sour in building anything like this.

Zz.

Socio-Economic Impact of the LHC

This is an interesting analysis of the impact of the LHC, especially in terms of economics.

I think many politicians and the general public do not realize that even for something that is built to study something that appears to be esoteric and no direct and immediate application, there can be immediate benefits socially and economically.

That is why I continue to be surprised and appalled that the US continue to not "care" about their loss in having any kind of high-energy physics particle collider on their soil anymore. This is especially puzzling in light of the fact that other parts of the world are seriously pursuing having such experiments within their borders, even if it is under an international collaboration. Certainly China is pursuing having such facilities, and Japan just announced the start of an electron-positron collider. As far as I'm aware of, Japan is the leading contender for hosting the International Linear Collider (ILC), something that Fermilab has also been pursuing.

But with the devastating budget issues in the US, this is looking to be very bleak. People seem to only see the money being spent on such facilities, without realizing the significant impact not only on the intellectual aspect of it, but the economic impacts, both short-term and long-term. An analysis done in this preprint may not make it to the people who hold the power, but it is certainly there to be seen.

Zz.

APS Physics Highlights of 2015

APS's Physics lists its highlight stories of 2015.

I need to point out something important that a casual reader might miss. The story on the 3D imaging  of a virus may appear to be an advancement in biology or medical science. And it is, because this allows us to understand a virus better than before. However, it should be pointed out that this capability came into being because of advances in accelerator  science. The imaging was done at SLAC's LCLS, which is a free-electron light source. This involves an advancement FIRST in accelerator science. Only after that are we able to create such a FEL that can produce light sources to do the imaging.

The point I'm trying to make here is that, if you value the field of biology and all the medical advances to help you live better, you should look at how these fields are able to accomplish such a thing. Just look at the National Institute of Health's funding projects, and see how many of them use instruments and facilities that all started out as something a physicist would use. Only later on were they adopted for use in other fields.

So without proper funding and support for the very basic research in physics, which in turn drives not only knowledge, but also the advancement in instrumentation and facilities, these new techniques and technology will not trickle down to the field of biology, chemistry, and medicine.

Zz.

Accelerator Development For National Security

So let me point out this news article first before I go off on my rant. This article describes an important application of particle accelerators that has an important application in national security via the generation of high-energy photons. These photons can be used in a number of different ways for national security purposes.

The compact photon source, which is being developed by Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Idaho National Laboratory, is tunable, allowing users to produce MeV photons within very specific narrow ranges of energy, an improvement that will allow the fabrication of highly sensitive yet safe detection instruments to reach where ordinary passive handheld sensors cannot, and to identify nuclear material such as uranium-235 hidden behind thick shielding. "The ability to choose the photon energy is what would allow increased sensitivity and safety. Only the photons that produce the best signal and least noise would be delivered," explains project lead Cameron Geddes, a staff scientist at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center.
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To make a tunable photon source that is also compact, Geddes and his team will use one of BELLA's laser plasma accelerators (LPAs) instead of a conventional accelerator to produce a high-intensity electron beam. By operating in a plasma, or ionized gas, LPAs can accelerate electrons 10,000 times "harder" or faster than a conventional accelerator. "That means we can achieve the energy that would take tens of meters in a conventional accelerator within a centimeter using our LPA technology," Geddes says.

I've mentioned about this type of advanced accelerator scheme a few times on here, so you can do a search to find out more.

Now, to my rant. I hate the title, first of all. It perpetuates the popular misunderstanding that accelerators means "high energy physics". Notice that the production of light source in this case has no connection to high energy physics field of study, and it isn't for such a purpose. The article did mention that this scheme is also being developed as a possible means to generate future high-energy electrons for particle colliders. That's fine, but this scheme is independent of such a purpose, and as can be seen, can be used as a light source for many different uses outside of high energy physics.

Unfortunately, the confusion is also perpetuated by the way funding for accelerator science is done within the DOE. Even though more accelerators in the US is used as light sources (synchrotron and FEL facilities) than they are for particle colliders, all the funding for accelerator science is still being handled by DOE's Office of Science High Energy Physics Division. DOE's Basic Energy Sciences, which funds synchrotron light sources and SLAC's LCLS, somehow would not consider funding advancement in accelerator science, even though they greatly benefit from this field. NSF, on the other hand, has started to separate out Accelerator Science funding from High Energy Physics funding, even though the separation so far hasn't been clean.

What this means is that, with the funding in HEP in the US taking a dive the past several years, funding in Accelerator Science suffered the same collateral damage, even though Accelerator Science is actually independent of HEP and has vital needs in many areas of physics.

Articles such as this should make it clear that this is not a high energy physics application, and not fall into the trap of associating accelerator science with HEP.

Zz.

The compact photon source, which is being developed by Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Idaho National Laboratory, is tunable, allowing users to produce MeV photons within very specific narrow ranges of energy, an improvement that will allow the fabrication of highly sensitive yet safe detection instruments to reach where ordinary passive handheld sensors cannot, and to identify nuclear material such as uranium-235 hidden behind thick shielding. "The ability to choose the photon energy is what would allow increased sensitivity and safety. Only the photons that produce the best signal and least noise would be delivered," explains project lead Cameron Geddes, a staff scientist at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-national-high-energy-physics.html#jCp

The compact photon source, which is being developed by Berkeley Lab, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Idaho National Laboratory, is tunable, allowing users to produce MeV photons within very specific narrow ranges of energy, an improvement that will allow the fabrication of highly sensitive yet safe detection instruments to reach where ordinary passive handheld sensors cannot, and to identify nuclear material such as uranium-235 hidden behind thick shielding. "The ability to choose the photon energy is what would allow increased sensitivity and safety. Only the photons that produce the best signal and least noise would be delivered," explains project lead Cameron Geddes, a staff scientist at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center.

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2015-04-national-high-energy-physics.html#jCp

Crowdfunding Physics?

I read this article on Symmetry yesterday and started to think of the idea of going directly to the public for funding. It is an intriguing idea, especially since federal funding of the physical science in the US has been declining for the past decade or more. This is especially true for high energy physics, which is the focus of this article.

I look at how much research grants that I had gotten, and they seem to average between $150k to $250k per year, and each of these grants ran for a period of 3 years. The money typically paid for part of my salary, a postdoc, a graduate student, M&S (materials and supplies), and the relevant overheads. In some cases, it is for the purchase of capital equipment.

But this is not a "sexy" area of study that most of the public are enamored with. It is not a search for exotic, godlike particles, or searching for the elusive dark matter/dark energy, or anything remotely front-page news. This is a "workhorse" area of study, where our advances allow other areas to be able to achieve progress in their areas. We do a lot of the behind-the-scene dirty work that seldom get appreciated, but yet, are vital components to progress.

Crowdfunding for something that isn't sexy? Might be improbable.

Zz.

Chemistry Nobel Prize Goes To Physicists

The Nobel Prize in chemistry this year goes to a team that was responsible for the development of fluorescence microscopy.

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to three scientists whose work surpassed the long-established resolution limit for optical microscopes. The award went to Eric Betzig of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Stefan W. Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, and William E. Moerner of Stanford University “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.”

There is an important point here that should be addressed to the public, the politicians, and those who think that we can fund one part of science over another. Many of the instruments used in chemistry, biology, medicine, etc. came out of basic physics research. Before anyone else used these instruments, physicists were the first people to thought of the concept, develop the theory and instrumentation, and then used them. It is only after that that the potential applications for such a device can be envisioned in other fields.

This technique is not the first. The history of Nobel prizes is littered with many instruments that came out of physics but are now ubiquitous in other fields. STM/AFM instruments are indispensable in biology and chemistry, yet this is clearly an instrument that came out quantum mechanics and then developed by physicists once they knew that such a device can probe a sample of interest. Only after that is the possibility of applications in other areas can be seen.

So folks, when you choke the support, and the funding, of basic science/physics, please note that you are really choking off the upstream waters. You may not feel the effect right away, but eventually, your water supply will drop down to a trickle, and you don't quite now what happened. The instruments that those people funded by the NIH here in the US were all derivatives of devices invented out of physics!

Think about that next time you want to cut off your nose to spite your face.

Zz.

Three US Dark Matter Projects Get Funding Approval

The US Dept. of Energy and National Science Foundation have jointly approved the funding of three dark matter search projects. These projects were selected based on the recommendation of the P5 panel, which released its report earlier this year.

Two key US federal funding agencies – the Department of Energy's Office of High Energy Physics and the National Science Foundation's Physics Division – have revealed the three "second generation" direct-detection dark-matter experiments that they will support. The agencies' programme will include the Super Cryogenic Dark Matter Search-SNOLAB (SuperCDMS), the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) experiment and the next iteration of the Axion Dark Matter eXperiment (ADMX-Gen2). 

Certainly, with High Energy Physics funding in the US being squeezed and shrinking each year, this is the best outcome on funding for the search of dark matter experiments.

Zz.

A Disappointingly Weak Case Made For HEP Funding

When I came across this blog entry in Huff Post by a high-energy physicist, I thought, "Oh good! Someone is going to make a good case to the public on why they, and the politicians, should not make funding cuts to HEP". I was sadly disappointed after a rather weak essay made to argue for its support. The basic argument was made in the very last paragraph:

I encourage you to find out more about the exciting science to be done. I hope that after this significant planning exercise, our field will be able to make the case that we are good stewards of the public money, have an exciting program that benefits humanity, and will receive more positive news from the budgets to come.

In other words, fund us because we do good and important science.

Unfortunately, in this day and age, such a thing just doesn't work, or is not that convincing anymore. In fact, I think in the few essays on this that I've written on my blog, I had made a more convincing arguments on why HEP funding is NECESSARY, and I'm not even in HEP!

Whenever someone from an esoteric field such as HEP, Astrophysics, etc.. tries to make a point on why it is necessary to fund such a field, there must be several different types of argument to be made when it is pitched to non-specialists/scientists:

1. Pitch the science, i.e. what are you trying to do.

2. Argue why basic knowledge, even when there seems to be no obvious application or benefit to mankind, is necessary, based on history.

3. Argue why the process of studying these things, especially in experiments done, had produced numerous "by products" that are now ubiquitous in our lives. So even areas that may not have any immediate applications from the knowledge, have produced many immediate applications just from the pursuit of studying these things.

4. Present the percentage of money being spent in perspective, i.e. look how how minuscule the funding for HEP in DOE's Office of Science, for example, when compared with the funding levels of other fields and when compared to the cost of a single stealth bomber. You cannot just present a number to the public without putting in some context and perspective. After all, to many (all?) of us, US$750 million is a lot of money! But is it a lot when compared to the overall funding picture and the costs of many of the things being paid out of the US budget?

Based on my interactions with many of the members of the public for many years, both in person and online, these are the four main points that I have found to be effective in convincing many to fund these areas that are very hard to argue for based on the nature of the subject matter. I don't have to argue that hard to convince the public on why funding the study of semiconductors or quantum computation is necessary. They can already figure out the potential applications of these things. Arguing why they need to fund the search for the Higgs require a lot more effort, and a lot more careful thought than just to argue that it is a necessary step in the intellectual process, or that we need to cater to our curiosity. A lot of people are curious, yet they don't seek millions of dollars of public funding to satisfy those curiosities. You need to make a careful, thoughtful, and convincing argument on why support such a thing is important in a number of ways, and how previous fundings of such areas have impacted our lives.

Make it so that they should care!

Zz.

Synchrotron Radiation Center Set To Close

Another important science facility in the US is set to be shut down for good. The Synchrotron Radiation Center at the University of Wisconsin is set to close its doors for good on March 7.

After funding cuts from the National Science Foundation and the lab announced its preparations for closure, UW provided the lab with short-term funding as alternatives were sought. Bisognano said he has been looking for other sources for funding over the past several years, but with a shortfall of approximately $5 million, he has announced that the lab will be forced to close in March.
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“Over the past few years, we’ve developed an infrared beam that can measure the structure and the chemical identity of the target material at the same time,” Bisognano said in a statement. “This device is the best in the world, and that’s probably the saddest part about shutting this down.”

I believe if you also look at the incredible body of work out of the Campuzano's group at Argonne/UIC on ARPES measurement on high-Tc superconductors in the late 80's, 90's, and well into the early 2000's, you'll find that these were done at the SRC. This small facility, with barely a drop in the bucket in terms of funding costs, was a workhorse!

While many other countries, especially China, are racing to add scientific facilities within their countries, the US is tripping over itself to close one after another. At what point will the public and the politicians make this realization?

Zz.