The German Electron Synchroton (DESY) in Hamburg recently received good news and not-so-good news in a single breath: On 5 February, Germany’s science ministry announced that it will ante up €337 million ($363 million), or half the cost of the lab’s proposed x-ray free electron laser (X-FEL), but that, at least for now, it will not commit to the lab’s ultimate goal of building a supercon-ducting electron—positron collider, a contender to become the world’s next-generation particle accelerator. Both projects got conditional endorsement last year from Germany’s national science council (see Physics Today, November 2002, page 24).
Because DESY had hoped to garner greater support for TESLA, its proposed TeV-Energy Superconducting Linear Accelerator, the government’s decision to defer is disappointing. “Some people took the announcement as bad news, others took it as good news,” says Allen Caldwell, a particle physicist from Columbia University and the Max Planck Institute for...
