[ETS/PARC List] Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research

[Drew Moore]

 Re: Bell Labs Kills Fundamental Physics Research
    Posted by: "ednjus" ednjus at yahoo.com ednjus
    Date: Fri Aug 29, 2008 6:17 am ((PDT))



>
>  Posted a couple days ago on Wired
>  
>  http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/08/bell-labs-kills.html
>
>   

And Nature published an obituary on August 24:

Bell Labs Bottoms Out

It generated six Nobel prizes in as many decades, but after a string
of staff departures, physicists claim that the once iconic Bell
Laboratories has finally pulled out of basic science.
Just four scientists are left working in Bell's fundamental physics
department in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Nature has learned. Others have
either left or been reassigned to other parts of the company, and a
major materials-fabrication facility has been shut down.
"Four people can't be called a basic research group," says Ronen
Rapaport, who left the laboratory last summer for a position at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "It's a single project."

But officials at Alcatel-Lucent, Bell's parent company, say that
reports of the lab's death are greatly exaggerated. Fundamental
science remains, but it has moved away from physics, says Gee
Rittenhouse, vice-president of research at Bell Labs.
"We've shifted the fundamental research over to include mathematics,
computer science, networking and wireless," he says.

Founded in 1925, Bell Labs was once considered the world's
pre-eminent industrial laboratory for physics (see `Moving with the
times'). Scientists working there regularly won Nobel prizes,
including ones for the invention of the transistor and the laser. Much
of the early work was funded by the enormous profits of Bell's then
parent company, AT&T, which held a monopoly on US telecommunications
for more than half a century. But deregulation forced AT&T to split
off Bell and other parts of the company into Lucent Technologies in
1996. Lucent struggled to finance its new research arm and the
situation rapidly deteriorated after demand for telecommunications
equipment collapsed in 2001. Faced with redundancies and cutbacks, the
lab's reputation was dealt a further blow in 2002, when one of its
star researchers, Jan Hendrik Schön, was found to have falsified data
in more than a dozen papers (see Nature 419, 419–421; 2002). 

Some believed that the lab's fortunes could be reversed by Lucent's
merger with French telecom firm Alcatel in 2006 (see Nature 440, 1111;
2006). But Alcatel-Lucent has faced six consecutive quarterly losses
and its stock value has halved since the merger. On 29 July, Serge
Tchuruk, the company's chairman, and Patricia Russo, its chief
executive, both announced that they would step down.

The latest troubles of the parent company have been mirrored at the
lab. Alcatel-Lucent does not provide information about redundancies,
but Bell's Murray Hill campus has been "heavily consolidated" since
the merger, according to Bettina Tratz-Ryan, a telecoms analyst with
Gartner, an IT market-research firm based in Stamford, Connecticut.
Staff levels have been cut and some buildings have been sold to
property speculators. In February, Bell shut down a topof-
the-line silicon fabrication facility once used by materials
scientists. Rittenhouse confirmed that around 20 people were made
redundant or reassigned as a result of the shutdown.

Given the grim outlook, many scientists started to look for other work
to avoid redundancy,according to Vladimir Aksyuk, a visiting professor
at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in
Gaithersburg, Maryland, who left Bell Labs in May. Throughout
the turmoil, a small and talented group of roughly 30 physicists
remained committed to basic research, but most have now left for more
stable jobs. "The company just can't support research anymore," Aksyuk
says."Walk down the halls and there's a bunch of empty rooms."

"Almost everyone has gone away now," agrees Dick Slusher, a former
Bell researcher now at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Slusher and others say that just Mike Manfra, Lauren Pfeiffer, Steve
Simon and Robert Willett continue to conduct basic
physics research at the laboratory.

Rittenhouse does not deny that the lab's focus has changed, but says
Bell's research needs to be aligned with the company's needs. Lucent
spunoff its semiconductor business in 2002 and its business needs have
since moved away from materials science and towards networking, he
says. "We've had to adjust our physics group's focus." In addition to
quantum computing, he says, Alcatel-Lucent's 850 or so researchers
continue to work on high-speed electronics and micromechanical
electronic devices. "We can still do good research," he argues

For physicists such as Rapaport, however, the halcyon days are over.
The stock certificates he brought with him from Alcatel-Lucent are so
diminished in value that he won't even bother to sell them, he says.
Instead, "I can hang them on the wall as a memory of Bell Labs."