SAD

``The 2012 budget's best-known victim is the Tevatron, the particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. The DOE planned to close the facility this year as operations scaled up at the more powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) near Geneva in Switzerland. But the Tevatron's excellent performance prompted US researchers to request an extension, which the DOE turned down because it would have cost $35 million a year. Postdocs such as Elisa Pueschel of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, saw this coming three years ago. She moved from the Tevatron to the LHC, and says that many Americans there expect to stay abroad indefinitely.

The DOE opted to close the Tevatron in part to focus on other experiments, including several aiming to capture elusive particles of dark matter or study the properties of neutrinos. Lately, though, budget concerns have hit these plans too. The DOE and the NSF have yet to reach agreement on how to fund the Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL), to be based in Home­stake, South Dakota, which would host many of these experiments. This project is estimated to cost between $800 million and $900 million.

The United States leads the world in developing the sophisticated beams, accelerators and detectors used in neutrino and dark-matter experiments. But it may no longer be eager to host them. "Lower-cost countries will say we'll dig the hole to put your detectors in," says Milind Diwan of Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, New York, a co-spokesman for the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment, to be based at DUSEL.''

Nature News