After several decades of steady growth and achievement, Australian physicists are struggling. Deep funding cuts imposed by the coalition government have hurt the subject, especially in universities, and physicists can see only a dim light at the end of the tunnel. Although physics has not been singled out from other disciplines for cuts, its plight has become a public exemplar of what is happening throughout Australian university life.

The government claims the cuts are needed to improve the nation’s economic performance, but physicists fear that their subject will be downgraded from its status as a core scientific discipline. Some departments are already threatened with closure, while others are being slimmed down or merged with engineering. Researchers are also being asked to do increasing amounts of teaching.

Despite these problems, Australian physicists continue to be productive in research, particularly in astronomy and atomic and molecular physics. The strongest groups are surviving and some physicists recognize that rationalizations were necessary – indeed inevitable – after a period of rapid university growth. But as they lobby the government to rectify the situation, physicists are finding it hard to make much headway.

Funding squeeze

Since the conservative coalition government came to power last year, Australia’s higher education sector has been in regular conflict with the combative education minister, Amanda Vanstone. She has refused to finance long-delayed salary increases, and cut university budgets by about 15% over the four years to 2001. The knock-on effect is that the Australian Research Council (ARC), which supports individual peer-reviewed projects in universities, faces an 11% cut over three years to its annual budget, worth A$429 m (about £192 m) this year. Researchers are also dismayed that only 21% of grant applications to the ARC currently win funding.

Max Brennan – the plasma physicist who was head of the ARC for five years until August – claims that physics’ share of the ARC budget has increased slightly since last year, when it was worth A$23.5 m. However, Brennan would not comment further about the state of Australian physics, other than to say that “optics is the only field that has been targeted for priority in ARC funding”.

According to figures from the Bureau of Statistics, the total public expenditure on physics in Australia was A$182 m in 1994-95. The money supported 711 researchers, 881 technicians and postgraduates, and 590 other staff.

Erich Weigold, chairman of the Australian Academy of Science‘s national committee for physics, paints a gloomy picture of the physics scene. “[There is] severe pressure throughout and, in some universities, collapse and upheaval, ” he says. But the biggest concern facing the country’s 36 universities, according to Weigold, is “how people are disappearing in an unplanned and uncoordinated way. This is leaving physics in a vulnerable position, he says. He also points out that Australia lags well behind other OECD countries in the relative spend on physics and engineering.

Staffing cuts of 20% in individual universities have been common, but some physics departments have suffered even worse. The University of Tasmania, which is renowned for radioastronomy, has shed 12 of its 17 staff over the past two years, while the University of Queensland has lost one-third of its physics lecturers. At Queensland and at La Trobe in Melbourne, the physics and engineering departments have been merged.

Some smaller universities in rural areas have dropped physics teaching altogether, while the physics departments at Flinders University near Adelaide and Wollongong University near Sydney are even threatened with closure. The Wollongong case has become a national cause célèbre. One political columnist backed physics with such effect that the university announced last month that the department would remain, although it too would be transferred from the science to the engineering faculty. Other universities, such as the University of Technology in Sydney, have coped with the rapid drop in resources by rationalizing their offerings with the University of Sydney and not spreading themselves too widely.

As head of physics at the University of New South Wales – one of the largest physics schools in the country – Jan Oitmaa is well aware of the current crisis. Over the past four years he has had to cope with losing 12 of his 45 academic staff and the same number of general staff. “People are discouraged. Young physicists are in despair at their lack of career prospects. It’s not a pretty picture, ” he declares. “Unless there is an increase or redistribution of government funding, it will be difficult for any physics department to remain at world quality”.

Oitmaa is also president of the Australian Institute of Physics (AIP) and has carried out a survey of heads of physics at the country’s universities. It makes depressing reading. According to preliminary results, the number of academic staff has fallen from 389 in 1994 to 327 this year – a drop of 16% – and the number of general staff has dropped by a similar amount, with more cuts expected next year. Although student enrolments in physics have risen by 2.7% to 3892 full-time equivalents over the past three years, the total student load actually includes a lot of students, such as engineers, who take physics as a side subject.

The survey also asked heads of department to list the factors that are having “a harmful effect on their performance and viability”. Their biggest complaint is the increased teaching load, which has made it harder to do research and supervise postgraduates. Many also decry “the poor image of physics in the community” and are worried by the “harmful effects of excessive competition, such as the loss of the academic ethos, and a poor government attitude to universities”.

Tony Klein, a physicist at the University of Melbourne, believes that science policy in the university sector is driven entirely by student numbers. His colleague, Geoff Opat, agrees. “This place is thriving and vibrant but fragile. We have acted as a shield to the outside world but we can no longer do that, ” says Opat. “A ‘user pays’ market should not bethe sole criterion for a physics department.” University administrators fear that the government could introduce a large hike in tuition fees for science courses, which could deter students from choosing physics. Tuition fees, which were introduced in 1989, were increased substantially by the government last year.

Others, however, are more sanguine. “Prospects for our postgraduates in academic teaching and research are nil, but they all appear to get jobs, many by dispersal into non-academic areas, ” says Keith Nugent, head of physics at the University of Melbourne, which has 80 research students.

And although Richard Collins, head of physics at Sydney, speaks of “severe effects on confidence from staffing losses and halving of funding over five years”, he points to the continuing high quality of his students. “Seldom do any of our first-degree or postgraduate students fail to get jobs within three months of graduation, ” he adds.

The latest job statistics for physicists – published by the AIP in the July/August issue of The Australian and New Zealand Physicist – reveal that in 1996 university teaching appointments fell into the red, and industry and commerce effectively stopped advertising for physicists. Although the AIP has met the science minister, Peter McGauran, several times, he appears to have no flexibility to redistribute funds. “He comes across as very interested and supportive, but he hasn’t produced any kind of initiative with any real effect, ” says Oitmaa.

As in other countries, women are greatly in the minority in Australian physics. Only 11% of the AIP’s 2461 members are women, and there are no female professors. Cathy Foley, who chairs the AIP’s women in physics group and is one of the few senior female researchers in the CSIRO, criticizes the institute for not taking the problem of female students seriously enough. Although half of all chemistry students are female, physics has lagged at around 27% of enrolments. Foley believes that if more women chose to do physics, it would boost student numbers in physics and so drive more government funding into the subject.

Stars in their eyes

Despite the funding problems, Australian physicists continue to publish widely in a range of international journals. In particular, the country plays a leading role in atomic and molecular physics. Stars of the show in the early days included Bob Crompton and Leonard Huxley at the ANU, whose electron-swarm experiments still set the standard for low energy electron-atom and electron-molecule collisions. The University of Western Australia in Perth extends this tradition today – as do Flinders, Griffith and Murdoch. There are also strong laser physics groups at Adelaide, Macquarie and the ANU, while non-linear optics is another big area.

Plasma physics, meanwhile, is well-represented at Flinders and supported by the Heliac National Fusion Plasma Research Facility at the ANU. Australians claim to be the world-leaders in helicon plasma etching, depositing and processing of materials and wafers. Last year the ANU also opened the country’s only accelerator dedicated to nuclear physics, which now operates regularly at 16 MeV.

However, the only truly big science in Australia is astronomy. There are about 250 researchers in the field and they use a range of facilities. The Siding Spring Mountain site in northern New South Wales, for example, contains the 3.9 m Anglo-Australian Telescope and three ANU telescopes that are searching for dark matter in the form of massive compact halo objects (MACHOs). Although no longer the largest telescope in the southern hemisphere, the Anglo-Australian telescope is still highly innovative. The two-degree field instrument, for example, can study up to 400 galaxies at once and is creating the first map of the structure of the whole southern sky.

New South Wales is also home to CSIRO’s Australia Telescope National Facility, which runs seven 22 m radio dishes at two separate sties, and a 64 metre dish at Parkes, about 300 km west of Sydney. The Parkes dish was upgraded this year with a multibeam receiver and is surveying thousands of galaxies in the Southern skies. Australia is also a partner with the US in an observatory on the South Pole, which is selecting the best place in Antarctica to build a permanent telescope. The superbly clear skies of the Antarctic may come to rival the power of the Hubble Space Telescope – at a fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, the University of Sydney has a synthesis radiotelescope near Canberra to look for pulsars. The university also runs optical interferometers at the Narrabri Observatory that contain unique instruments for measuring the diameters of stars.

Since the early 1990s, Australian astronomers have also been trying to join in international projects. They smelled success in 1994 when the European Southern Observatory invited Australia to become its first non-European member and share in its Very Large Telescope, a linked set of four 8 m telescopes being built in Chile. Unfortunately, successive Australian governments have refused to pay Australia’s part of the project.

However, a new opportunity for international collaboration arose earlier this year, when Chile appeared unable to pay its share of the six-nation Gemini project – twin 8 m telescopes in Hawaii and Chile. Although the ARC promised to make a financial commitment to the project (Physics World September p5), Chile finally came up with the money and Australian hopes for international collaboration appeared to have been dashed once again. A new approach to Australian membership could, however, succeed.

Meanwhile, radio astronomers at the Australia Telescope National Facility are at the forefront of an international collaboration seeking to build a 1 km² super-sensitive telescope. There are several possible designs and sites, including a location in Australia.

Industrial action

Research physicists and applied physicists can also be found throughout Australian industry. However, Dennis Cooper, head of CSIRO’s telecommunications and industrial physics division, is hard pushed to assess the state of physics in the commercial world. “The problem is finding it. There are no big deals out there and there has been no economic analysis of physics’ impact, ” he says. CSIRO’s chief executive, Malcolm McIntosh, has told Cooper “to go out and get some excitement into Australian science”.

But with 310 research staff – including about 200 physicists – CSIRO’s telecommunications and industrial physics division has the largest concentration of physicists in Australia. It has an annual budget of A$48 m, of which 26% is earned externally. The problem, according to Cooper, is that industry has no tradition of pulling ideas through. “Young people studying physics don’t know where they will get a job, no matter how interesting they find the subject, ” he says.

CSIRO has therefore been successfully pushing for industrial applications, most coming from fundamental research. Examples include an unbalanced magnetron sputtering system, which lead to the deposition of titanium nitride by focused ion beams to make highly smooth, hard coatings for machine and dental tools. The Australian Mint now produces coins using dies that have been coated in this way. Larger devices are also being built to give longer life to drill bits for the mining industry.

Another winner is an application of hardness measuring equipment, which was developed by CSIRO and is now being licensed. The equipment reveals information about phases of materials from ultra-micro indentations, and 25 units have been sold world-wide for A$100 000-200 000 each. Intel, the US semiconductor giant, has already bought one.

Meanwhile, in a new lab at the University of New South Wales, Bob Clark builds transistors based on quantum effects and quantum wires using home-made equipment that would otherwise have cost about A$20m. Clark is also an expert in generating huge magnetic fields, and has created a world-record field of 70 T in his lab. He has also generated fields as high as 800 T at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US, by compressing magnetic fields with high explosives.

The division also inherited a 50-year tradition in radio research. The work was initially triggered by the demands of radar specialists returning from the Second World War, who wanted highly sensitive receivers to investigate signals from the cosmos. Basic research in this area has lead directly to commercial applications. The division’s new multi-beam antenna for radioastronomy research, which has been installed in the 64 m dish at Parkes, also allows a telecommunications dish to simultaneously access up to 20 geostationary satellites.

Commercial applications of physics are also being encouraged by several of Australia’s 65 Co-operative Research Centres. These are jointly run by universities, industry andthe CSIRO. For example, Bruce Cornell and colleagues from the CRC for Molecular Engineering and Technology in Sydney have demonstrated a new nano-scale blood-type biosensor that can detect large proteins, bacteria, viruses and antibodies (Nature 1997 387 580). Unfortunately, the CRC programme has been threatened by David Mortimer, a businessman who shocked the science community in July when he recommended – in a report on industrial policy – that government funding for the CRCs should be decimated.

Get packing

According to Eric Weigold at the ANU, two areas in which Australian physics is under-represented are condensed-matter and high-energy physics. Much research in these areas relies on expensive, collaborative facilities, and the physics community lead a long campaign to convince successive Australian governments that the country should become a member of such international labs.

Crystallographers and chemists eventually managed to get into “suitcase science” in 1991, when they persuaded universities and funding bodies to support the Australian National Beamline Facility at the Photon Factory in Tsukuba Science City, Japan. The beamline is the first permanent Australian research facility overseas, and is now run by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) as a service to all scientists. An ANSTO-led consortium was also awarded A$11m in 1995 to take a share in the advanced photon source at Argonne National Laboratory in the US. The first Australian experiments were carried out there by Melbourne biomolecular scientists last month.

However, Australian particle physicists were not able to persuade the government of the merits of collaboration in their subject, and the high-energy community was prevented from gaining access to high-energy accelerators overseas. Like the Bragg family before them, most Australians in the field left their homes for good.

George Dracoulis, who is head of nuclear physics at the ANU, claims that his fission and fusion group leads the world in rethinking how heavy nuclei fuse. But like other Australian physicists, resources are a nagging worry. “Our lab is running at the scale of a national lab in the US, like Argonne and Berkeley, yet we have one-third to one-quarter of their staff and resources.” Australia is not prepared to support home-grown facilities, but it is only too willing to fund “suitcase scientists” who travel overseas, declares Dracoulis – before dashing off to a conference in Copenhagen.