Effectiveness of UK’s neutron source jeopardized by lack of funding

Guardian : Hundreds of scientific experiments are being dropped by British universities because of budget shortfalls at ISIS, one of the UK’s major research facilities, writes Ian Sample for the Guardian. Built in the early 1980s at a cost of some $625 million, ISIS is a pulsed neutron and muon source used to probe the structure and microscopic processes of condensed matter. But it currently operates at only two-thirds capacity because the UK government has balked at paying the approximately $4.5 million in electrical and other miscellaneous annual costs to keep it running. As a result, ISIS receives twice as many applications as it can accommodate, and many scientists have given up applying. “The damage to the research base in UK universities across a number of disciplines is out of all proportion to the cost saving,” said Jon Goff at the University of London. “The saving comes mainly from electricity costs, and it equates in financial value to a single research grant to one group in a university. For this we lose a third of the science. . . . This substantially affects the international competitiveness of UK research.”