Three years ago, physicists in Canada suffered a collective shock. The Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) cut funds for the subject by 8%. The cut was the result of a pioneering effort by the council – the chief source of public funds for research in Canada – to reallocate research grants among the 20+ disciplines it supports.

“We basically suffered the maximum swing, ” laments Henry van Driel, a physicist at the University of Toronto. And the situation could get worse. NSERC is in the middle of a three-year period during which its overall budget is being cut by 20%, and it is also in the midst of another exercise that will reallocate another 10% of its budget. According to van Driel, the average physicist receiving federal support has suffered a 20-25% cut in funding in recent years.

Canada’s physics community clearly faces a difficult situation. The first reallocation exercise “provided a massive jolt to the system”, says Gordon Drake of the University of Windsor. “You are forced to make decisions on whether people with small grants should be cut off altogether to support high-quality work.” While no major physics or physicists have yet been lost as a result of the cuts, the community fears that the latest reallocation – which is due next year – could cause serious harm. Physicists are therefore working hard to justify physics research – and Canadian contributions to it – to the external referees who will determine NSERC’s new funding profile.

“We’ve been mounting lobbying efforts, ” says Drake. “The physics community as a whole is becoming more aware of the need to put forward the case why physics should be supported. If we get another cut, a lot of people will go out of business.”

No going back

Many Canadian physicists regard NSERC’s 1994 decision – which shifted money from physics to subjects such as biotechnology and engineering – as a major error of judgement. “There was a sense that the [reallocation] committee really didn’t understand the field, ” recalls Pekka Sinervo of the University of Toronto. Others feel that the physics community did not take the initial reallocation seriously enough – in terms of justifying their R&D efforts – until it was too late. Sinervo and others are now working to remedy that. Sinervo is in charge of writing a review of sub-atomic physics (as particle and nuclear physics is called in Canada) for the latest reallocation committee. Drake and van Driel are in charge of the general physics report, while Michael Thewalt of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver will cover condensed-matter physics. Significantly, written reviews of this type played no role in the 1994 reallocation.

NSERC will make its decisions on reallocating funds by next April. Much of the community anticipates those decisions eagerly. “I’m cautiously optimistic, ” says Sinervo. “We understand better the scientific process by which the fields are being judged. People are hoping that this new reallocation will produce an outcome that’s fair across the spectrum of science.”

Physicists are also facing the possibility that, fair or not, the reallocation could make the situation worse. “The mood of Canadian physicists is mildly despondent but somewhat optimistic, ” says Francine Ford, executive director of the 1600-member Canadian Association of Physicists (CAP). Despondency follows naturally from the funding situation, which is difficult even without reallocation. “Because of down-sizing, ” says Ford, “a lot of our membership is considering early retirement.” On the other hand, a “highly-qualified personnel” survey carried out this year for CAP by Michael Steinitz of St Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia tells a much more comforting tale. The survey focused on individuals who received bachelors’ degrees in physics from Canadian universities between 1985 and 1996. Fewer than 2% of roughly 950 respondents reported that they were unemployed. That number surprised Steinitz, who says that he tells his students “not to expect employment”. The survey should also provide answers to critics in government who, says Steinitz, believe that “physicists are unemployable, and the country should put money into areas where we can get employable graduates.” Not surprisingly, about half the respondents had jobs in R&D or teaching, and 52% reported that they use their physics background directly in their work. Even some of the anomalies show up well for physics training. “We found the highest salaries among graduates of sub-atomic physics courses who are now working in the stock market, doing time-series analysis, Fourier analysis and so on, ” reports Steinitz.

“It’s clear that a physics degree does not lead only into an academic or research lab career, ” comments Ford. “If that message can get out, the future of the discipline is fairly comfortable.”

Fundamental strengths

Canadian physics is healthy in more than its ability to produce graduates who can walk into high-paying jobs. The field has its share of world-class researchers and laboratories, in fields as diverse as cosmology, condensed-matter physics, atomic energy and optics. Indeed, the crown jewels of Canadian physics cover a wide spectrum.

Canada’s strength in optics and lasers is the legacy of Gerhard Herzberg, the Nobel laureate spectroscopist who worked at the University of Saskatchewan and then the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa. “Canada has a very strong reputation in areas related to spectroscopy, ” says Drake. “That has naturally fed into laser physics.”

One of the brightest stars in this firmament is the team headed by Paul Corkum at the NRC Steacie Institute for Molecular Sciences in Montreal. (Not to be confused with NSERC, which is a grant funding agency, the NRC runs 16 research institutes in 11 cities across Canada.) Corkum’s team specializes in high-intensity laser physics and works with femtosecond pulses of light that have very high intensity, even though they possess virtually no energy. The joy of the work, says Corkum, “is that femtosecond science has broad implications everywhere.” Two themes in his work are the creation of ultrashort pulses, lasting only 100 attoseconds, and the use of laser pulses to monitor chemical reactions. “Within a year, ” says Corkum, “we’ll be able to image chemistry as it occurs.”

Optics research at Laval University in Quebec has also led to several successful spin-off companies (see box).

At Windsor University, Drake leads a group of international renown that specializes in the theory of helium’s atomic structure. “Helium is much more convenient than hydrogen because it is monatomic, ” explains Drake. “We can do things so accurately that we’re at the border between atomic and nuclear physics.” Table-top laser experiments can now explore regions of physics that once required nuclear accelerators, says Drake. Another highlight is Sageev John’s group at the University of Toronto. John’s work focuses on photon localization and the application of photon band-gap materials (in which photons behave analogously to the way electrons behave in semiconductors). His group is also studying – theoretically at present – new phases of light between the coherent and incoherent states. “The main thrust and attraction here is the combination of quantum optics and condensed matter physics, ” he says. “This has important implications for switching and optical transistors.”

Within condensed matter physics there are also strong groups working on high-temperature superconductivity at the University of British Columbia and McMaster University, while semiconductor physics takes the spotlight at Toronto, British Columbia and St Francis Xavier Universities.

Canada’s best-known astronomy centre is probably the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics (CITA), which was founded in 1984 to provide theoretical support for a country with a long history of outstanding observations. Based at the University of Toronto, CITA has a large and successful post-doctoral school, funded by NSERC. “We always have the same short-list of post-docs as Caltech and Princeton, ” boasts deputy director Peter Martin. “And our faculty members are so good that they’re under attack by recruiters from foreign institutions.” Indeed CITA has lost two senior members to the US in the past six months, including former director Scott Tremaine, who was recruited to head Princeton University’s astrophysical centre.

“Our mandate is to do a bit of everything and evolve with the times, ” adds Martin. Part of CITA’s role is to promote theory at other universities, so its researchers have a broad range of interests, with particular strength in cosmology – notably microwave background, galaxy formation and the early universe.

Working with industry

The National Research Council (NRC) runs a number of institutes that have strong physics programmes and good links with industry too. The Institute for National Measurement Standards in Ottawa, for instance, provides precision measurements for international standards bodies and commercial customers. One particular speciality is standards relevant to the telecommunications industry, which associate research officer Alan Madej describes as “a big theme in Canada”.

Another NRC lab in Ottawa, the Institute for Microstructural Sciences, also works on issues relevant to telecommunications. Research at the Institute includes fibre optics, solid-state optoelectronics, nanoelectronics and single-electron transistors. Again, practical applications are becoming as important as fundamental research. “If you understand the problems of industry in a two-to-five-year time frame, you can understand better the requirements for a ten-year time frame, ” explains Thomas Jackman, director for materials technologies. About two hours drive west of Ottawa are the Chalk River Laboratories of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd (AECL), another organization that is becoming increasingly commercial. Bertram Brockhouse shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for his pioneering neutron scattering experiments at Chalk River in the 1950s. Now the lab’s key product is the CANDU of series nuclear reactors. Originally developed in the 1940s, the reactors can burn a variety of fuels, including spent fuel from light water reactors.

About 100 physicists work in Chalk River’s fuel and fuel cycle department. “Fuel cycle technology is a big area of R&D in Canada and AECL, ” explains department director Peter Boczar. The technology has brought commercial rewards and CANDU reactors are either operating or under construction in five countries outside Canada. Another venture, to develop reactors that make medical isotopes, has recently received the official go-ahead.

But Chalk River has had its share of bad news recently. Last year the government closed down the Tandem Accelerator Superconducting Cyclotron (TASCC) at the lab. TASCC employed about 70 physicists, although half have found other positions in AECL. Some of the rest are expected to move to the TRIUMF facility in Vancouver, although TASCC’s director, John Hardy, has left Canada for the University of Texas at Austin.

TRIUMF has a star turn of its own – the isotope separation facility known as ISAC. Scheduled to start up in 1999, ISAC will produce low-energy radioactive beams for nuclear physics and astrophysics experiments. “It is being built by the Canadian government, ” says Sinervo, “and the primary users will be Canadian.”

That emphasis is unusual in a way. Canadian physicists, including Sinervo, often express their pride in their country’s strong record of collaboration in international ventures. “One of the features of Canadian physics is the variety of international collaborations we maintain, on an individual as well as an institutional basis, ” says Drake, whose group collaborates with teams in the US, UK, Italy and Germany. Sinervo points to two larger collaborations in sub-atomic physics. In a nickel mine 2070m below ground in Sudbury, Ontario, physicists from Canada, the UK and the US are building a massive neutrino detector. The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory will be able to distinguish different types of neutrino from the Sun because it uses heavy water to detect these elusive particles. Canada has provided about C$300m worth of heavy water, and is responsible for about two-thirds of the total project. Elsewhere, Canada has a 3% stake in the Atlas detector planned for the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva.

People, as well as projects, have an international flavour in Canadian physics. “The University of Toronto attracts very good post-docs from Europe, ” says Sageev John. “Canada as a whole is very attractive to foreign physicists and it’s not as difficult to emigrate to as the US.” John’s own group includes physicists from China, Ethiopia, India, Russia, the Ukraine and Vietnam. And from a different floor of the University of Toronto’s MacLellan physics building, CITA dispatches trained astrophysicists all over the globe.

Might effective placement become a brain drain in an era of concern about funds for research? “There are no hard numbers, just a general concern raised by our members, ” says Francine Ford. This concern focuses on the US where, she says, physicists can expect “more money, more support, better facilities, and more stability.” And unlike their counterparts in the US, Canadian physicists receive no government funds for defence-related research.

Ford notes some recent high-profile moves to the US, including Tremaine from CITA and Hardy from TASCC. “If you lose enough of those people, you lose your standing on an international level.”

Preventing future shocks

So what is the Canadian physics community doing about the situation? The Canadian Association of Physicists and leading physicists have recently joined with leaders of other scientific fields in an effort to put their views across to parliament. According to Ford, “the physics community has been much more active, presenting a common front to the government.” Gordon Drake agrees: “The physics community as a whole is becoming more aware of the need for putting forward the case why physics should be supported.” The scientist/lobbyists are working against long odds. “Science is not at the cabinet table per se, ” says Ford, explaining that the Secretary of State for Science and Technology reports to the Minister of Industry. And basic research seems to be the major target for funding cutbacks. “We’re trying to give them the old message that you don’t cut the tree to harvest the fruit, ” she adds. “One of the difficult messages to get across is that fundamental research should be funded by the government.”

Some parts of government have received the message. Ontario’s provincial government has set up a series of scientific centres of excellence over the past nine years. One success story is the Ontario Laser and Light Wave Research Centre, on the University of Toronto campus. Staff at the centre aim to communicate academic findings to industry, carry out their own research, and provide an instrumentation or resource facility where industry can do short-term testing and development. And prominent companies are trying to form links to academic physics departments across Canada. Northern Telecom, for example, has set up the Nortel Institute of Communications, which endows chairs and funds students. Much of what is happening in Canada – an increase in funds for university-industry collaborations at the expense of support for pure research – mirrors what is happening in the US and throughout Europe. But Canadian physicists have learned the lessons of 1994 and they are ready to temporarily swap the lab for the lobby in the defence of their subject.