Tevatron shuts down

[phongn]

Physicists who study the most basic building blocks of the universe have just said goodbye to a beloved giant in their field.

Not a fellow scientist, but rather, a machine. A huge device near Chicago called the Tevatron.

For about a quarter of a century, the Tevatron was the most powerful machine of its kind in the world, but scientists gathered Friday to shut it down in a brief and bittersweet ceremony.

The Tevatron, located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, was designed to reveal the mysterious innards of tiny atoms. To do that, the machine had to be really complicated and really big. It sent bits of atoms racing through an underground tunnel four miles around.

Protons and antiprotons sped up to nearly the speed of light, then smashed together so that scientists could sift through the subatomic rubble for clues about hidden particles.

"It was a very interesting machine to work on in the first place, because we knew we were building something that had never been built before," said Roger Dixon, who has worked at Fermilab for more than three decades.

He says people who worked closely with the Tevatron felt the machine had a real presence. "It definitely has a personality, and that started right away," Dixon said. "It had an attitude at the beginning."

As one operator wrote in recollections posted by Fermilab: "The Tevatron does not forgive mistakes and it punishes those who have the temerity to think they know what they're doing. The Tevatron taught me humility and gave me paranoia."

Dixon says caretakers endlessly battled things like floods, blizzards and weird equipment failures to keep the Tevatron running 24 hours a day, seven days a week — because it was worth it.

"This machine has certainly opened windows on the universe that you couldn't imagine opening before," he said. "It's done a great job."

For example, the Tevatron is where the top quark was discovered — confirming scientists' predictions about the fundamental nature of matter. And the technology inside this machine laid the foundation for an even bigger and more powerful particle collider that's just fired up in Europe, the Large Hadron Collider.

That collider is what finally made the Tevatron obsolete.

Decades ago, a physicist named Helen Edwards led the construction of the machine. On Friday, she stood in the Tevatron's control room, where she had the honor of shutting it down, in a ceremony that was broadcast online.

When operations expert Bob Mau gave her the go-ahead, Edwards pushed a big red button. He pointed to a computer screen. "As you can see on the red display, the line has gone to zero," Mau announced, "so there is no longer any colliding beams of protons and antiprotons in the Tevatron."

Then he told Edwards to push a blue button, to turn off power to its 4-mile ring of superconducting magnets. The light on the button went off, but for a long moment nothing happened on the computer screen. Then, a green line began to drop. "There it goes," Mau said. "It didn't want to give up so easy!"

The power faded away, and that was that.

The Tevatron's Twitter feed and Facebook page announced simply, "It is done. The Tevatron is now off."

Fermilab invited all its scientists to a party, a kind of wake for the beloved physics instrument. The researchers will now turn to other experiments, and the lab hopes to build new physics machines to probe elusive particles like neutrinos.

The silent Tevatron will eventually be opened up for public tours, to let people see the machine that was once the greatest in the world.

[whackadoodle]

Fermilab invited all its scientists to a party, a kind of wake for the beloved physics instrument. The researchers will now turn to other experiments, and the lab hopes to build new physics machines to probe elusive particles like neutrinos.

Not likely - at least in the near future; in the current political climate here in the U.S. Although, opening it to the public will actually give me a reason to visit notChicago Illinois.

But, hey, private vulture venture capitalism/corporate-funded research will step into the breach to build the next particle physics research tool...right?

Yeah, right.

[Temujin]

Sadly it only cost a paltry $35 million a year to keep in running. That's within the range of some corporate fat cats salaries.

Tevatron atom smasher shuts after more than 25 years

One of the world's most powerful "atom smashers", at the leading edge of scientific discovery for a quarter of a century, has been shut down.

The Tevatron facility near Chicago fired its last particle beams on Friday after federal funding ran out.

Housed in a 6km-long circular tunnel under the Illinois prairie, the Tevatron leaves behind a rich scientific legacy.

This includes finding nature's heaviest elementary particle: the top quark.

Since 1985, engineers have been accelerating bunches of proton and antiproton particles around the Tevatron's main ring at close to the speed of light, then smashing them together in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe.

But the Tevatron has been superseded by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - located on the French-Swiss border - which is capable of getting to much higher energies than the US machine.

Shortly after 1400 local time on Friday, the Tevatron's designer Dr Helen Edwards was due to push a button in the control room that diverts the last beam of particles into a solid metal block, closing the book on an era in American big physics.

The particle accelerator is run by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, which is now likely to shift its emphasis to projects that - for example - rely on particles at high intensities, rather than high energies.

"People like me, who have been here for many years, are very attached to the Tevatron. The Tevatron has really defined this laboratory over the last 30 years," said Dr Roger Dixon, head of the laboratory's accelerator division, who nevertheless said he was enthusiastic about future projects at Fermilab.

For many, the closure will be a solemn occasion, at a time when US budgets for science are increasingly being squeezed.

"If you ask me whether I'm confident the country can keep doing things, it's hard to read the newspaper everyday and believe it's going to work out, but we have to trust that it will," Dr Dixon explained.

'So close'

Earlier this year, Fermilab announced plans to lose 100 jobs from the lab, 50 of which will come from voluntary redundancy, a spokesman said.

The decision to shut down the Tevatron came as a bitter pill for physicists who had been pushing the machine's limits in an effort to smoke out the elusive Higgs boson particle.

Researchers have repeatedly stated that they are closing in on the Higgs, which - if found - would explain the origins of mass and is the last missing jigsaw piece in the most widely accepted theory of particle physics - the Standard Model.

A bid to extend the Tevatron's lifetime by three years was denied in January 2011 because the US Department of Energy could not come up with the extra $35m per year required to keep the machine running. An expert panel recommended the extension but its advice was not followed, turning the quest for the Higgs into a one-horse race.

"In the Higgs game, we are still competitive and we hope to have our final results next year," said Professor Stefan Soldner-Rembold, spokesperson for the Tevatron's DZero experiment.

He told BBC News: "There are always reasons for and against an extension. I still think especially in terms of the Higgs it would have been nice to have another three years. We can see now that we are so close."

The data collected up until the shut down will continue to be analysed and could still produce a surprise, he explained, but extra time would have helped bolster the statistical significance of any potential discovery.

"I think a lot of people feel we could have continued for a bit longer, but the mood is not that bad," Dr Dixon explained.

Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, told the AFP news agency: "In our field we don't keep beating our heads if we have been outdone by another machine."

The origins of the Tevatron stretch back into the 1970s, when the idea of building a superconducting proton synchrotron was hatched. Originally known as the Energy Doubler, the machine was switched on in 1983 and smashed together its first particle beams two years later.

In 1995, physicists at the Tevatron announced the discovery of the top quark, a new addition to the "zoo" of particles described in the Standard Model. This is the most celebrated of the Tevatron's many discoveries, but the machine has continued to push the boundaries of knowledge right up to its shutdown.

Fermilab physicist Dr Dan Hooper said of the Tevatron's legacy: "The thing it really did is took us from a point back in 25 years ago where we had every reason to think the Standard Model was not going to survive the onslaught of the Tevatron... the amazing thing about the Tevatron is that didn't happen."

He told BBC News: "We tested the Standard Model very, very aggressively and it came out alive and well. That's really the legacy in my mind."

After the Tevatron closes its doors, Fermilab will concentrate on smaller-scale experiments such as Project X, an effort to develop ever more intense particle beams.

"The idea is we shift to those areas where we can make the greatest contributions to understanding," Dr Oddone said, "sometimes the biggest discoveries come from smaller projects."

The Tevatron's main ring is likely to be used in other experiments, and components may be transferred to other accelerators.

[Simon_Jester]

The heart of the problem, I think, is that for high-energy collision physics, the Tevatron really is drastically inferior to the LHC, even without factoring in planned upgrades to the LHC that are due to be worked in over the next decade.

It's not just the collision energies (2 TeV versus 7-14 TeV at the LHC); it's that many of the interesting things that can come out of a collision become vastly more probable as a function of energy, nonlinearly so. To illustrate, you might see the Particle of the Week one time in a trillion from a 2 TeV collision at the Tevatron, and one time in a hundred billion from a 7 TeV collision.* Thus, to observe X appearances of the Particle of the Week, you need to do ten times as many collisions at the lower beam energy than you do at the higher beam energy.

Which means that the LHC can gather in a month a pile of data on the Particle of the Week that would take the Tevatron nearly a year, even if the Tevatron got as many collisions per second as the LHC, which it doesn't.

*Numbers are not necessarily representative, but they get the idea across.
_____________________

Now, this is not to say there isn't relevant science that could still be done at the Tevatron. Personally I'd be happier to see it keep running, because it's also a locus for development of some of the same technologies that can be used to upgrade the LHC and build and improve other, different types of large accelerator (which few here will have heard of, but which people in the accelerator community are quite interested in).

But this is not the first time that old colliders have been superseded by more energetic, more intense ones. The Tevatron itself, along with a few other major installations like RHIC and SLAC, helped to make obsolete an entire generation of accelerators built in the '50s and '60s, at various labs and universities around the country. If the old SSC had been built in the US, the Tevatron would probably have been shut down several years ago, for that matter, because the SSC would be doing the same thing the LHC is now doing: drawing off brainpower and funds by exploring a frontier the Tevatron can't reach, and promising a much more detailed map of the territory the Tevatron can reach.

[K. A. Pital]

You can still do relevant science on older facilities. And if people wouldn't have been fucktards and dicks, they would use older scientific facilities as running testing fields and invite and train physics specialists from other nations, less developed ones. But... people are fucktards and dicks.

[phongn]

You can still do relevant science on older facilities. And if people wouldn't have been fucktards and dicks, they would use older scientific facilities as running testing fields and invite and train physics specialists from other nations, less developed ones. But... people are fucktards and dicks.

Tevatron is just too expensive to keep running, unfortunately. Simon is right - LHC beats it in virtually every way (except maybe sensitivity for lower-mass Higgs) - it has higher center-of-mass energy and more luminosity.

The rest of the accelerator chain will still be running, though, for neutrino studies. There's two big projects that the lab is hoping to build for neutrino and rare process experiments.

If the old SSC had been built in the US, the Tevatron would probably have been shut down several years ago, for that matter, because the SSC would be doing the same thing the LHC is now doing: drawing off brainpower and funds by exploring a frontier the Tevatron can't reach, and promising a much more detailed map of the territory the Tevatron can reach.

As an aside, one of the two final SSC proposals more or less used the Tevatron as an injector into the main SSC ring

[Simon_Jester]

Yeah. Fermilab, and probably a significant fraction of its tech-development role, stays open. What shuts down is the Tevatron, a specific (huge) installation at Fermilab, and again I can see why- the return on collecting another year of Tevatron data is fairly small compared to the return on collecting even a much shorter period of LHC data.

[Elheru Aran]

...okay, so here I was picturing a Transformer wearing sandals. Did anybody get that image too?

(note for the uninformed, Teva is a brand of outdoor sandal...)

[Iroscato]

...okay, so here I was picturing a Transformer wearing sandals. Did anybody get that image too?

(note for the uninformed, Teva is a brand of outdoor sandal...)

No.