Symmetry factor

Yesterday the President’s request for the 2008 budget was announced (see the Department of Energy’s share here: http://www.energy.gov/news/4706.htm). So, the American Competitiveness Initiative is still there — great! Also, DOE’s Office of Science, the largest federal supporter of basic research in the physical sciences (half of the faculty in our Department are supported by DOE), requests $4.4 billion, with major increase in nuclear fusion research (that is because US has joined ITER, the first international experimental fussion reactor to be built in France). If approved, RHIC would be able to run (good for our dept’s nuclear experimentalists), as well as the Tevatron (also good for our dept’s HEP experimentalists). In all, the HEP budget proposal’s dynamics looks as follows (in millions of dollars):

2006 actual … 2007 est. … 2008 est.

…..701 ………… 733 …………… 782……

So it is a 0.9% increase in funding… not much… The only thing is that a huge chunk of that funding, SLAC linac operations, will be transferred from HEP to Basic Energy Sciences, so really it is a 12.6% increase in 2007 and additional 3.7% increase in 2008 (update: this info is from the Under Secretary Orbach’s presentation of the 2008 budget request available here, see footnote on page 4). One thing, though, is that I don’t know what “2007 est.” is, as so far we’ve been operating under Continuous Resolution, i.e. all the grants have been funded (so far) at the level of last year, dollar-by-dollar…. Congress is still working on 2007 budget…