FERMILABDave Schmitz spent the early part of last year's Christmas holiday at home in Chicago, poring over his graduate thesis and postdoc fellowship application essays. It was a big career step for Schmitz, a neutrino physicist about to finish his PhD at Columbia University in New York. He was writing a five-page research statement, part of the application for the Lederman Fellowship, a prestigious postdoc position at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.
Then the budget news broke. On 19 December, the US Congress passed a year-end spending bill that devastated the high-energy-physics community, reducing its budget by $94 million (see Nature 451, 2–3; 2007). Within days, Fermilab announced that it would lay off around 200 employees — about 10% of its staff. It also mandated that all staff take a week of unpaid leave every other month. Stunned, Schmitz e-mailed the head of the fellowship selection committee to ask her if he should even bother applying. "Do I want to start my career at a place that's having such difficulty?" he recalls thinking. "It gave me serious pause, and made me think that maybe I should consider something else."
Pier Oddone: "You cannot expect to go on for a decade without capital investment and still have competitive facilities."F. ULLRICH/FERMILABThe budget woes were just the beginning for the US physics community. Throughout 2008, signs of recession deepened, casting a pall over lucrative non-academic physics jobs in technology or on Wall Street, a job market that tends to march hand in hand with the economy. And all of this on the eve of a once-in-a-decade event in high-energy physics: the opening of a new collider. This month, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle accelerator centre near Geneva, Switzerland, will start smashing particles together at the highest energies the world has ever seen. Fermilab's Tevatron will be eclipsed as the world's most powerful accelerator, putting the lab at a further disadvantage as a destination for top high-energy-physics talent.
With fewer than 300 research scientists and little more than 50 postdocs, Fermilab employs only a small proportion of the high-energy-physics community. But thousands of university scientists — most of them in the United States — are affiliated users. And, as the only dedicated particle-physics laboratory in the United States, Fermilab is a bellwether for the community, a place that is watched closely. Right now the outlook is fairly bleak.
When the Tevatron is shut down in 2009 or 2010, the United States will not have laboratories exploring the energy frontier of particle physics for the first time since the 1930s, when the early accelerators were built. And little relief is expected, says Fermilab director Pier Oddone, who laments the lack of investment in other experiments. Much time, effort and money were put into planning the International Linear Collider (ILC), a successor to the LHC that Fermilab hoped to build in Illinois. The future of the ILC is now tenuous at best. "You cannot expect to go on for a decade without capital investment and still have competitive facilities," Oddone says. "There's a real crunch right now."
For now, though, Schmitz and others have a reprieve. Schmitz got the fellowship. A few weeks before he began in June, an anonymous donor gave Fermilab's operators $5 million to avert the unpaid furloughs. And several weeks after that, Congress tacked on $62.5 million for high-energy physics to a supplemental spending bill for the war in Iraq, putting an end to lay-offs.
Fermilab Lederman fellows Dave Schmitz (top) and Diego Tonelli (centre), and CERN theorist John Ellis.R. HAHN/FERMILAB, CERNAlthough the immediate crisis has been averted, the long-term health of high-energy physics remains in question, says Roman Czujko, director of the Statistical Research Center of the American Institute of Physics (AIP) in College Park, Maryland. "The decline in the United States — this is the big deal," he says. In fact, that researchers can easily get a postdoc position might be a barometer for how bad things are, says Czujko. "The postdoc numbers invariably go up during a downturn in the economy," he says. "Instead of buying a piece of equipment, you buy yourself a postdoc for a year."
A rise in postdoc numbers during the past year could also reflect a downturn in entry-level non-academic industry jobs, leading physicists to opt to continue their studies a little longer. But in the long term, the opening of the LHC, alongside the decline of accelerators at Fermilab, could put the squeeze on academic physics postdoc positions in the United States. Czujko says this is especially relevant to high-energy physics. According to a 2007 AIP survey, almost four out of five students with PhDs in high-energy physics go on to postdocs rather than potentially permanent jobs in the workforce. That's a higher proportion than in most of the more practical subcategories of awarded physics PhDs, such as applied physics, where more than 50% are able to secure potentially permanent jobs.
As a result, Czujko says, high-energy physicists are more susceptible to the vagaries of federal funding of national research laboratories such as Fermilab. Eventually, he expects the number of high-energy-physics PhDs and postdocs to decline. "It will be tougher for them to find support in the United States. Those who do — they'll have to avail themselves of the equipment at CERN."
CERN and the LHC are already a big draw. As a string theorist, Fermilab postdoc Mark Jackson doesn't need to be near CERN's equipment. But he still wants to be in Europe to be near the heart of the action. Currently in the final year of his postdoc, Jackson has just accepted a position at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Like five of his colleagues, he'll be following the new machine.
At Fermilab, his postdoc pays about $50,000. Leiden University will pay a base salary of E39,000 (US$57,000). But it wasn't a little extra money that seduced him. "Anyone doing physics isn't too concerned about their salaries," he says. The draw was quick and ready access to the data soon to pour out of the LHC, as well as Planck, a European Space Agency mission scheduled to launch in early 2009 that will study the 'cosmic microwave background' — that is, radiation from the Big Bang.
Fermilab is fighting to stay relevant and remain a draw for top talent — partly through LHC collaborations. At the Remote Operations Center, Fermilab employees can work on one of the LHC's two main detector experiments, which are connected by a high-throughput computer-networking grid. That, combined with Fermilab's stable of theorists and technicians who already familiar with the trials and tribulations of the Tevatron, will make Fermilab a fertile crucible for good work, says Oddone. "What we have aimed for here is to try to have a critical mass, such that, once the detectors are running at the LHC, the experience of coming to Fermilab to do physics is as rich as it would be to go to CERN," he says.
Others aren't convinced. Steve Nahn, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, is sceptical that the remote centre will really mimic the experience of working at the LHC. "There's no crucial operation that it does," he says. "If it were unmanned, the show would go on. And that will be its problem." He adds that being an ocean away means missing out on the hallway conversations or discussions in an expert's office that elucidate the day-to-day quirks of operating one of the most complicated machines on Earth. He has sent all four of his graduate students and postdocs to Europe to work full-time at CERN.
CERN's Large Hadron Collider will be the world's highest-energy particle accelerator.M. BRICE/CERNMany US universities are following suit. Of the 9,300 outside 'users' of CERN — a number that is up 50% since 2004 — some 1,400 are American, according to John Ellis, a senior theorist at CERN. "They are now the second-largest national contingent here, exceeded only slightly by Italy, and way ahead of Germany, France and the United Kingdom," he says.
But as at Fermilab, the number of staff physicist positions are few and hard to come by. In fact, CERN is having to cut back on its staff PhD physicists, says James Purvis, CERN's head of recruitment. During the past decade the number has dropped from 100 to 78, he says. "The only way of building the [LHC] project with a constant budget was with fewer people."
The high-energy-physics job market at universities doesn't seem to be faring much better. In the United States, retirement and vacancy rates for physics faculty members are going down as the number of temporary or non-tenure track physics faculty goes up, according to AIP surveys. "There are certainly many more people than there are spots," says Nahn, who got his tenure-track job at MIT only after six years as a postdoc. "The competition is pretty steep."
Many hope the LHC will not only generate new findings, but ample high-energy-physics research and career opportunities. "If this machine at CERN does even half the things we expect it do, it will be great," says Diego Tonelli, an Italian who is in the second year of a Lederman fellowship at Fermilab. "We'll have another 50 years of nice times."
