Physics cuts put livelihoods, investment and reputation at risk

Cutting the UK out of the Electron-Ion Collider project will damage science, says Daria Sokhan

On the last Friday before Christmas, at 4.45pm, with no advance warning and with three months to go before the expected start of the £58.8 million UK Research and Innovation Infrastructure Fund Electron-Ion Collider project, I received a letter informing me that it has “not been prioritised by UKRI at this time”—read: fully defunded.

With no further information from UKRI for a month, it emerged only gradually that EIC-UK was one of four Infrastructure Fund projects to be quietly cancelled, totalling £280m.

The EIC is an international nuclear and hadron physics facility starting construction this year at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US. Highly complementary to all previous and existing facilities, including the Large Hadron Collider, it is primed to be a leading future facility for research into the structure of matter.

The EIC has been designed to address fundamental questions of nature, including how over 99 per cent of the mass of the visible universe is generated from almost massless quarks and gluons, and how hadrons and nuclei acquire their fundamental properties, which underpin the diversity of observable phenomena in the universe.

The EIC community includes over 1,500 scientists from more than 40 countries around the world. The UK has a long track record of leadership in defining the physics of the EIC and the design of its detectors. Currently, 10 UK scientists serve in coordination roles on detector and physics working groups and on the executive committee for the collaboration formed around the EIC detector.

UK skills undermined

On 27 March 2024, UKRI and Brookhaven publicly announced the EIC-UK award, committing to funding seven UK universities (Birmingham, Brunel, Glasgow, Lancaster, Liverpool, Oxford, York) and two national labs (Daresbury and Rutherford Appleton) for eight years to design, build and deliver three critical detectors and accelerator components crucial for the high-precision scientific mission of the EIC. The project involves 78 people, about a third of whom are early career researchers. After the announcement, the UK funding bodies consistently signalled commitment to UK participation in the project.

The reputational damage to the UK as a result of our sudden withdrawal from the EIC is immense. It is made all the more acute by the indispensability of unique UK expertise and skills to the realisation of the facility.

Without the UK, several critical components of the EIC will face a funding and skills gap that is now looking insurmountable, leaving a major hole in the experiment that will severely reduce the facility’s flagship capabilities essential to deliver its ambitious physics programme.

The consequences of now reneging on those commitments reach far beyond the EIC—will any international collaboration view the UK as an equal, relevant and trustworthy partner in the future?

UKRI has repeatedly stressed that projects affected by funding withdrawals are new ones. This is simply not the case for EIC-UK. The project began years ago, with funding from the US, and since 2021 with £3m from the Infrastructure Fund. As such, the loss of the funding and the withdrawal from the international EIC project comes when the work is in full swing, with people in post—of whom 10 are in danger of imminently losing their jobs—and the international EIC project fully reliant on UK commitment.

Investment opportunities lost

The loss of opportunities to UK industry and to maintaining the UK’s competitive advantage cannot be overstated. The project offers a direct pipeline of skills—in particular for the semiconductor, medical physics and nuclear energy industries—through training of next-generation scientists and technicians. Through synergetic technologies, it aligns with a large number of industrial strategy growth sectors.

Cutting the project cuts significant opportunities for knowledge transfer and for industrial spin-offs, and it delivers a blow to the future industrial growth potential of the UK. All just to enable a short-term financial saving.

The effect on the funding landscape for nuclear, particle and accelerator communities in the UK goes far beyond the direct loss of £58.8m, half of which was to pay for jobs. It precipitates a domino effect of loss in leverage funding. For example, the US has now signalled the withdrawal of funds for EIC accelerator R&D in the UK, which supported three PhD students, midway through their projects, and a researcher.

Nuclear physics projects have a track record of attracting funding from industry in recognition of their direct applicability, which has often in the past matched the funding provided by the government. The loss of such a major project as EIC-UK will put a severe dent in these opportunities.

Talent at risk

UKRI is energetically messaging that it is protecting curiosity-driven research. There seems to be a widening chasm, however, between this rhetoric and the reality of UKRI cuts.

The cuts deny our scientists the opportunities to take leadership in answering fundamental questions about nature. We will not be able to attract the best talent from abroad and will instead start to haemorrhage ours to other countries. Loss of trust in UK funding institutions will kill motivation, in particular for early career researchers, to invest time in developing major projects when they cannot be sure of continued support. It is simply incompatible with the government’s vision of the UK as a scientific and innovation powerhouse.

This decision has been taken without meaningful and timely consultation of the scientific community that it so strongly affects. I believe it has also been taken without full realisation of its deeply damaging implications.

Some of the damage could have been mitigated by a clear UKRI commitment to remain a partner in the EIC but deliver a descoped version of the project. Science and Technology Facilities Council advisory bodies exist precisely to provide expert advice on complex and far-reaching project decisions. Bypassing them places the scientific and industrial growth of the UK at severe risk—precisely the opposite of the outcomes UKRI and the government want to achieve.

The recent cull of UKRI projects, among them EIC-UK, erodes trust from the UK scientific community and internationally, kills opportunities and risks relegating the UK to a scientific backwater.

Daria Sokhan is a senior lecturer in physics and astronomy at the University of Glasgow and principal investigator of the EIC-UK project.