Tevatron Accelerator to Shut Down This Autumn

According to officials at the US Department of Energy (DOE), the Tevatron particle accelerator, the most famous in the United States, will be closed down this September. The announcement was made on January 10.

Physicists at the DOE Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), in Batavia, Illinois, had hoped to use the facility for at least a few more years, in a bid to discover the Higgs boson.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) constructed the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the largest particle accelerator in the world, precisely for this reason. But the facility was plagued with technical issues in its first year.

That is why Fermilab scientists hoped to use the Tevatron while CERN repaired the LHC, in a bid to beat the European research project to the elusive component of the Standard Model. But the elementary particle will most likely be found at the LHC now.

In all fairness, the Tevatron is beginning to show its 25 years of age. As far as facilities of its type go, this one is obsolete, and needs to be replaced with a larger, more modern accelerator.

The DOE initially agreed to fund Tevatron operations by 2014, but earlier this month it announced Fermilab that it had no way of coming up with $35 million each year to do that. In addition, the LHC may no longer close down in 2012, as originally announced.

A CERN official hinted that the accelerator could continue to operate up to 2013, which means that it chances of finding the Higgs increase considerably over the Tevatron's, Science News reports.

“The Tevatron has now accumulated enough data to be sensitive to the mass of the Higgs [as predicted] in the Standard Model,” explains Tevatron spokesman Stefan Söldner-Rembold.

“We have reached a threshold and it seems like a waste to turn [the Tevatron] off at such a moment when one is almost there,” he adds. The expert is also a physicist at the University of Manchester, in England .

The American particle accelerator can reach energy levels of up to 1.96 trillion electron-volts (TeV) per beam, compared to the 7 TeV per beam the LHC is capable of. The European facility can host collisions at 14 TeV total output power.