NIGHT FALLS: The Tevatron particle accelerator outside Chicago was for 27 years the world's most powerful window into the subatomic universe.
Image: Courtesy of Fermilab
In Brief
- The Tevatron, formerly the world’s most powerful particle collider, will cease operations by October 1. It has been supplanted by the Large Hadron Collider.
- Despite the shutdown, physicists at the facility are poring over data that might reveal evidence of the long-sought Higgs boson.
- Scientists at Fermilab hope to build a new accelerator called Project X by 2020 and, after that, a successor to the LHC.
More In This Article
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Overview
Three Decades of Discovery
Underneath a relict patch of illinois prairie, complete with a small herd of grazing buffalo, protons and antiprotons whiz along in opposite paths around a four-mile-long tunnel. And every second, hundreds of thousands of them slam together in a burst of obscure particles. It’s another day at the Tevatron, a particle accelerator embedded in the verdant grounds of the 6,800-acre Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory complex in Batavia, about 50 miles due west of Chicago. There have been many days like this one, some routine, some spectacular; of the 17 fundamental particles that physicists believe constitute all the ordinary matter and energy in the universe, three were discovered here. But there won’t be many more such days. By October 1 the power supplies for more than 1,000 liquid-helium-cooled superconducting magnets will have been turned off forever, the last feeble stream of particles absorbed by a metal target, ending the 28-year run of what was until recently the most powerful particle accelerator in the world.
For several hundred physicists here who have spent nearly two decades searching for a hypothetical particle called the Higgs boson, the closure means ceding the hunt—and possible Nobel glory—to their archrival, the Large Hadron Collider, a newer, more powerful accelerator at CERN on the Swiss-French border. With its 17-mile circumference and higher energies, the LHC has displaced the Tevatron as the world’s premier particle physics research instrument, a position it will retain well into the next decade.
This article was originally published with the title Waiting for the Higgs.
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10 Comments
Add CommentIf light is energy wave/particle without mass and if gravity is a function of mass, what attracts light to gravitational force mass must be the cause of mass. e=mc2
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEnergy as well as mass is affected by (and has) gravity. The common denominator is energy - the generator of gravity is the same energy as that in both light and matter; light and matter both bend space. So we still don't have the explantion for why material particles are so much more massive than photons. Matter can turn into energy during stellar fusion, but do photons ever turn into material particles? If they did, and we could find out how, we might have a clue as to how lumps of energy are imbued with mass. To me it sounds like certain conditions will cause electro-magnetic energy to undergo as sort of black hole collapse, squeezing enough energy together in a small place to make it massive - perhaps somehow converting the erstwhile momentum of speed to rest-mass. Which mechanism is responsible for this phenomenon? Well, that's the big question. Maybe it's something to do with fields of some sort... I doubt there's a specific particle that "puts mass" into material particles; I think protons (ultimately quarks) have mass in and of themselves, because of their place in the universal gravity environment. Well, I'm just rambling, obviously...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm wondering if the "bump" in the Fermilab results is the same as the super-luminal result at CERN?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it is necessary to correct a slightly incorrect statement in this article, namely that the world's first particle accelerator was that of Ernest Lawrence in 1929. The truly first was a small "Linac", designed, built and successfully tested by the Norwegian Rolf Wider\"oe, as part of his dissertation at the German Technical University of Aachen in 1927/28 and published in: Archiv f\"ur Elektrotechnik 21, 387 (1928). In the appendix he also described the principles of the betatron as realized later by Kerst and Serber. The text is reproduced in English in the book: M.S. Livingston and J.P. Blewett, "Particle Accelerators", McGrawHill 1962.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(This discussion reminds me a little bit of the questions of who built the first (programmable) computer (probably Zuse), or who "invented" the automobile (Carl Benz, not Henry Ford).)
"Matter can turn into energy during stellar fusion, but do photons ever turn into material particles?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, high energy gamma rays can become an electron/anti-electron pair. I believe they can also become other particle/anti-particle pairs if they have enough energy. I think that's where we get the anti-protons we have.
Goodbye and goodnight ... another sign of the US's scientific demise. A sorry site but those dollars were needed for useless wars, a defense budget to defend the empire and politicians with no real feel for the need for science in any stripe.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust another sign of the falling American Empire. The desire to maintain the status quo and not to progress into the future, maintain what you got even at the cost of the future, that's what killed America.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@ gesimsek
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou have no clue what you're talking about.
Instead of shutting down the Tevatron completely, why not lease it to countries like India, Israel or Brazil for their scientists to do high energy experiments here? The money could then be used to do further research at FermiLab.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI made a video with artist Maria Scileppi
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisto commemorate the closing of the Tevatron.
We used bicycles and GPS data to re-enact a
collision of a proton and an anti-proton.
http://www.vimeo.com/29704725
Maria also has blog entry about the video at
http://mariascileppi.com/section/259898_Tevatron.html
Dr. Rob Snihur