Tevatron countdown

Tevatron countdown. Hopes among particle physicists to extend the life of the proton–antiproton collider at Fermilab through 2014 were dashed on 6 January: “Unfortunately, the current budgetary climate is very challenging and additional funding has not been identified,” wrote William Brinkman, director of the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science, to Melvyn Shochet, chairman of the department’s High-Energy Physics Advisory Panel. So, contrary to the recommendation by a HEPAP subpanel (see PHYSICS TODAY, December 2010, page 34 ), the Tevatron will be turned off this fall.

Highlights from the Tevatron include the discovery of the top quark in 1995, the observation in 2006 that B mesons oscillate, and the indications last year that B-meson decays produce slightly more muons than antimuons, which may help explain the dominance of matter over antimatter. In addition, a large range of mass was excluded for the elusive Higgs boson, which recently has seemed within the machine’s reach. The search for the Higgs will continue at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.

At a web-streamed all-hands meeting on 19 January, Fermilab director Pier Oddone stressed that the future of the lab is “very strong and very bright.” Data from the Tevatron will take a few years to analyze. Beyond that, he said the lab’s strategy will be to exploit the LHC and to do research and development for future machines. He estimated that about 100 jobs will be cut, not just at the Tevatron but so as to “optimize the workforce . . . for the future missions of the laboratory.”

Meanwhile, on 31 January CERN announced that the LHC will continue running at 3.5 TeV per beam for an extra year, through 2012. The collider will then be shut down to upgrade it to run at its full design energy of 7 TeV per beam starting in 2014.