Most everything you need to know about a particle collider can be summed up with just two numbers. The first is its energy—higher energies let scientists conjure up more massive particles (measured in gigaelectron volts, or GeV). The second is its luminosity, or the number of collisions per second. Engineers spent the first decade of the Tevatron pushing up its energy; they’ve spent the past two opening a trickle of collisions into a firehose. Here are a few of the more notable events in the life of the collider.

Interactive by Krista Fuentes

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