Because of a 30 per cent cutback in federal funding for the coming fiscal year, the Cambridge Electron Accelerator will lay off 68 employees and concentrate exclusively on just one high-energy physics project.

The budget which President Nixon sent to Congress earlier this month included only $2.4 million for the Accelerator, a joint Harvard M. I. T. project, in the year beginning July 1. The allotment for 1969-70 was $3,475 million.

"The cut reflects a lack of understanding for the role of fundamental research," CEA director Karl Strauch said yesterday. "It has forced us into an unreasonable situation."

Sixty-eight of the CEA's 180 employees-including scientists, engineers, technicians, and administrative personnel-have been informed that they must leave the Accelerator on July 1, or, in the cases of those with Corporation appointments, when the appointments expire.

Only One Project

In addition, the senior staff of the CEA have decided that, beginning July 1, only one project-Project Bypass-will use the CEA accelerator. Work on three other high-energy physics projects now being conducted at the CEA will be stopped.

Project Bypass involves the first attempt in the United States to bring about a collision between a beam of electrons and a beam of positrons, or positively charged electrons.

"Bypass is the most exciting and unique of our projects, and the most likely to insure a long life for the CEA," Strauch said. Because of the upcoming reduction in personnel and the extra time and effort involved in alternating projects on the CEA accelerator, he added, "continuing the other projects would slow down Bypass."

Physicists working on Bypass succeeded last month in producing and storing a high-energy positron beam. They have not yet been able to project positron and

electron beams simultaneously into the CEA accelerator.

The physicists are seeking to determine if Coulomb's Law-which asserts that electrons have no mass and that the force of attraction between two particles varies inversely as the square of the distance between them-holds true at distances as small as 10 to the negative 15 centimeters.