Tevatron Closure Marks End of Era, Research Will Continue
The Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory will still be crunching data from the collider for at least more two years, according to the United States Department of Energy (D.O.E.), even as Tevatron, the world's second largest particle accelerator, was closed on Friday.
Fermilab still has a few major projects to complete, including an inquiry into the composition of subatomic neutrinos by firing them underground to South Dakota and research on high intensity physics, dubbed Project X.
As of now, Fermilab employs about 1,900 people, including several hundred scientists. Some of these employees will be transferred to other initiatives at the lab, such as Project X, the MicroBooNe and the Illinois Accelerator Research Center.
Tevatron had been the world's largest particle accelerator until 2009, falling behind only to the Switzerland-based Large Hadron Collider of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). During its time as the largest accelerator, significant amounts of data were collected from its experiments.
For the moment, the construction of a new big particle project in the U.S. seems impossible considering the crisis of funds, forcing physicists from Fermilab and those from all over the country to request the D.O.E. to fund the existing intensity frontier, which explores fundamental particles and forces of nature using intense particle beams and highly sensitive detectors, as described by the Fermilab.
In 1995, Tevatron discovered the Top Quark, a particle which is one of the fundamental constituents of matter, leading CERN's Director-General, Rolf Heur, to say, Tevatron has made phenomenal contributions to particle physics.
In other new, scientists are also installing a device, called the Dark Energy Camera, in Chile. The device is believed to undertake the largest galaxy survey of all time.
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