Image credit: Peter Ginter.
The final particles will collide in Fermilab’s Tevatron this September at the end of the machine’s historic 26-year run. The Tevatron, the world’s largest proton–antiproton collider, is best known for its role in the discovery in 1995 of the top quark, the heaviest elementary particle known to exist.
The Tevatron has out-performed expectations, achieving record-breaking levels of luminosity. Fermilab had planned to shut down the collider in the autumn of 2011 but in August 2010 the laboratory’s international Physics Advisory Committee endorsed an alternative idea: extend the run of the Tevatron through into 2014. The US government’s advisory panel on high-energy physics agreed with the committee’s recommendation, provided that US funding agencies could increase annual support for the field by about $35 million for four years. This would have maintained the laboratory’s ability to continue with its variety of other high-energy physics experiments, some of them being in their critical first stages.
However, this was not to be. In January, Bill Brinkman, director of the US Office of Science, announced that the agency had not located the additional funds required to extend the Tevatron’s operations. The decision disappointed Tevatron physicists, but it also made more secure funding for the other experiments that will carry Fermilab into the future.
Following the closure of the Tevatron, Fermilab will continue on course with a world-leading scientific programme, addressing the central questions of 21st century particle-physics on three frontiers: the energy frontier, the intensity frontier and the cosmic frontier. At the energy frontier, the laboratory will continue its close collaboration with CERN and the international LHC community and will also pursue R&D for future accelerators. At the intensity frontier, Fermilab already operates the highest-intensity neutrino beam in the world and researchers there are about to begin taking data with the laboratory’s largest neutrino detector yet. At the cosmic frontier, Fermilab scientists will continue the search for dark matter and dark energy.
