Memorandum 27
Submission from Jim Hinton, STFC Advanced
Fellow, School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leeds
I am writing to you as someone heavily affected
by the STFC funding crisis, in particular the statement in the
Delivery Plan 2008/9-2011/12 that the STFC will *"cease to
invest in high energy gamma-ray astronomy experiments"*,
in the hope that this issue could be brought up at the Science
Budget Allocations meeting this Wednesday. I realize that the
decision to axe gamma-ray astronomy was made in the context of
a general crisis in astronomy funding, but I would like to try
to persuade you that this particular decision is unnecessarily
damaging to UK science.
Gamma-rays lie at the extreme high energy end
of the electromagnetic spectrum and as such represent a frontier
in astronomy. The first source of TeV photons (12 orders of magnitude
more energetic than visible light) photons was discovered in 1989
and within the last few years rapid progress has been made using
an instrument called HESS http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/hfm/HESS. More
than 70 sources are now known and new classes of TeV emitters
have been announced in a string of papers in the journals Nature
and Science. HESS recently won the European Union Descartes prize
for Science Research http://ec.europa.eu/research/index.cfm?pg=newsalert&lg=en&year=2007&na=na-070307-2.
The Cherenkov Telescope Array http://www.cta-observatory.org/
(CTA) project is a next generation instrument, planned to be ten
times more sensitive than HESS, which is highly ranked in several
European science roadmaps (eg ASPERA http://www.aspera-eu.org/images/stories/files/Roadmap.pdf)
and involves 11 European countries.
The UK is well represented in these projects
despite a very small share in the total costs. Of the seven science
working groups in HESS, two are led by UK scientists (myself and
Paula Chadwick at Durham). In CTA, three UK groups are involved
and I am the coordinator of the working group designing the array
through performance simulations (arguably the most important aspect
of the design study). It is a bitter irony that ground-based gamma-ray
astronomy has been supported in the UK through two decades of
difficult pioneering activity, but now that the field has emerged
as major astronomical discipline, the UK is planning to withdraw.
Now is really a time to reap the benefits of these years of low
level investment.
The impact of this decision on me personally
is very negative. I received my PhD from the University of Leeds
in 1998 working on cosmic rays with Prof. Alan Watson FRS. I then
spent 6 years abroad, working in the field of very high energy
gamma-ray astronomy, firstly at the University of Chicago and
later at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg.
After being awarded an international prize (the Duggal Award http://www.iupap.org/commissions/c4/website.html£duggal),
I returned to the UK in September 2006, to take up a 5 year STFC
Advanced Fellowship, to continue my research in the gamma-ray
field. For this work, I was recently awarded the UK Institute
of Physics (IOP) Nuclear and Particle Physics Division Prize http://www.iop.org/activity/groups/division/npp/Division_Prize/page_6752.html
for 2007. In the light of these achievements, I had hoped to secure
a permanent post working in the UK in gamma-ray astronomy in the
near future. Having just bought a house in Leeds, I am now faced
with the choice of moving back to Germany (or France, Italy, Spain,
Ireland . . . ) or the USA to continue my work, or giving up my
prominent place in an exciting and rapidly moving field, for an
uncertain future in a different area of astrophysics.
My colleagues in the department are similarly
affected and my PhD student Joanna Skilton, who started in 2007,
has also been placed in a very unfortunate position. This decision
sends the wrong message both to young scientists in the UK and
to the international community: that the UK is not the right place
to do cutting-edge research. I consider gamma-ray astronomy to
be excellent science and good value for money.
Less than 1 million pounds is needed in total
over three years to exploit current instruments and prepare for
the future. This is also an area of research that is inspiring
to many non-scientists (this is the high energy frontier of astronomy
and we deal with very exotic objects such as supermassive black
holes and supernova explosions). To leave this field now would
in my view be a huge wasted opportunity for UK science.
February 2008
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