Farewell, Tevatron: Fermilab's Particle Accelerator Will Cease Operation This Year
Fermilab's Tevatron Collider DOEAs the U.S.'s premier particle physics machine retires, the search for the Higgs falls to the Large Hadron Collider alone Tough budgetary times spare no one, not even the last best hope of American researchers discovering the "god particle" on their home soil. Rumblings and rumors surfaced early yesterday that Fermilab's Tevatron would not receive an extension to continue operations until 2014, and by later in the afternoon it was confirmed by the DOE's science office: Tevatron will cease operations before the end of this year. "The current budgetary climate is very challenging," the director of the DOE's Office of Science, William Brinkman, stated in a letter to the chairman of the High Energy Physics (HEP) Advisory Panel dated January 6, in which he effectively (and reluctantly) determined that Tevatron would shut down as scheduled this year. The friendly rivalry between Tevatron and CERN's Large Hadron Collider had been...