FOR 26 years before the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was fired up in 2009 at CERN, Europe's main particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva, the discipline was dominated by the Tevatron, the pride and joy of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, on the outskirts of Chicago (and, amusingly, next door to Geneva, Illinois). The machine was the first to smash particles at energies in excess of one trillion electron-volts?or 1TeV, whence its name. It nabbed plenty of subatomic exotica, including the top quark, a heavier cousin of the up quarks found in atomic nuclei, and made precise measurements of assorted fundamental physical parameters.
On September 30th, around 2pm central time, the venerable particle smasher will be put to rest (see article in this week's print edition). Some scientists get philosophical about its demise. ?Experiments are like lifeforms,? muses James Gates, a noted physicist and one of Barack Obama?s scientific advisers. ?They have lifetimes.? They are also rendered obsolete by newer, niftier kit; for all its might, the Tevatron pales in comparison to the LHC. And keeping it alive would have meant $30m-60m less for other promising projects at Fermilab. Pier Oddone, Fermilab?s Peruvian-born director general, wouldn't have it.
There will be no shortage of mourners. Roger Dixon, who heads Fermilab?s accelerator division, is planning a small wake after the last beam is aborted. Yet many of Fermilab?s boffins are not overcome with grief. For a start, the Tevatron detectors may not be recording any new collisions, but there are enough data to keep researchers at CDF and D-Zero busy for up to two years. They will be poring over petabytes of information for hints of, among other things, the elusive Higgs boson which is thought to be responsible for giving other particles their mass.
More importantly, a slew of new projects is in the offing. The laboratory?and, by the same token, the United States?may be throwing in the towel in the high-energy ring, admits Dr Oddone. But he believes it will soon be pushing what he dubs the "high-intensity frontier", focusing on what is emerging as the hottest thing in physics: mysterious particles called neutrinos. These tiny beasts continue to baffle physicists, most recently by appearing to travel faster than light.
Dr Oddone has spent the past few years planning for life after the Tevatron. This has allowed Fermilab to avoid major upheaval. There will be few lay-offs: a handful of veteran researchers have agreed to early retirement and a bunch of younger ones are moving to industry, which is only too keen to snap them up. One accelerator physicist who worked on the Tevatron has accepted a position operating tabletop accelerators used in cancer therapy at a hospital in California. For specialists like this, securing a well-paid job in the private sector is not hard. Companies are eager to tap their experience and know-how. Every time a budgetary squeeze is announced firms flood Fermilab with requests (unheeded) to place job offers in its internal communications channels.
Source: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/09/future-fermilab?fsrc=rss
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