By Ron Cowen
The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron will shut down by the end of September, the U.S. Department of Energy has announced, dashing hopes that the 25-year-old atom smasher in Batavia, Ill., might win a transatlantic race to find the most sought-after elementary particle in high-energy physics.
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Fermilab received the news from the Department of Energy on January 10 that the agency could not come up with an annual $35 million to keep the Tevatron running until 2014. The department’s advisory panel on high energy physics had recommended that the Tevatron operate for an additional three years after the European consortium CERN announced in early 2010 that its more powerful Large Hadron Collider would close down during all of 2012 for repairs. (It’s now likely that the collider will shut down in 2013 instead, a CERN official says.)
Electrical problems had already postponed by a year the opening of the Large Hadron Collider, until the fall of 2009. That delay, along with the future year-long shutdown, had seemed to give a leg up to the Tevatron in its search for the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would explain the origin of mass in subatomic particles.