Skewed US budget to impact high-energy physics research?

Fearing a cut in the domestic high-energy physics budget, scientists in the US have drawn up a plan to seek more international collaboration.

President Barack Obama's budget request for 2015 proposed a 6.8 percent cut to the Department of Energy's high-energy physics budget, down to $744 million (Rs.4,352 crore).

"Under a low-funding regime, the US risks losing its status as a global leader in the high-energy physics," predicted scientists in a latest report released by the Particle Physics Project Prioritisation Panel (P5), part of the US Department of Energy's high-energy physics advisory group.

The P5 report emphasised the need for the US to remain a key player in future developments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Europe's particle-physics centre near Geneva, Switzerland.

However, it reshaping a proposed neutrino facility at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, as an internationally-funded effort.

"That is a major change," Andrew Lankford, a physicist at the University of California, was quoted as saying in a Nature report.

A tight US budget may also rule out building a planned Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, intended to map galaxies and quasars to measure the expansion of the universe.