ISIS, Britain’s world-class neutron and muon source, might as well be called IS – as budget cuts announced today by the Science and Technologies Facilities Council (STFC) will shut down its operations for half the year.

The STFC has had to make some £12 million in research cuts for its 2009-10 budget – a deficit it had revealed in May. ISIS lost £2.3 million, and will only run for 120 days in 2009-10. It’s a familiar tale for the facility, which last year lost a similar amount, dropping its operating time from an average 180 to 150 days. (Fully funded, it should run around 220 days, according to a National Audit Office report).

The cuts will affect a number of research programmes; ISIS is used by over 1000 scientists and has just installed a £145 million second neutron target station.

Exact budget numbers were not available from STFC’s press officers on the day it announced the cuts, but the agency said it would also reduce its allocation to the Diamond Light Source synchrotron, and dial down operations at the Central Laser Facility (along with ISIS, all at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire).

It is also cutting funding for astronomy units in Cambridge and Edinburgh, deferring spending on MoonLITE (a lunar orbiting satellite that would shoot scientific instruments below the Moon’s surface), and delaying funding for other particle physics and nuclear physics projects.

Robert Kirby-Harris, chief executive at the Institute of Physics, called the cuts an “ill omen”. He added: “The over-riding message [to young scientists] appears to still be ‘Forget science, go and make shed-loads of money in banking’. Nothing has changed.”

Other coverage:

Flagship ISIS facility to go ‘part-time’ in wake of funding cuts (The Times)

UK physics hit by new cuts (Physics World)