Funeral for a Collider

Today is September 30th, 2011.  Today marks the end of era in physics.  Today is the last day of the Tevatron.

The Tevatron at Fermilab

Fermilab, which sits outside of Chicago, has an interactive timeline showing some of the milestones of the Tevatron, which was one of the world’s largest atom smashers.  The final pieces were installed on March 18, 1983 (a few weeks after I turned four years old) and broke record after record.  The Tevatron will always be known for the discovery of the top quark in 1995.  In fact, nearly everything we know about the top quark today is due to Tevatron data.  The world’s best measurements of the W mass come from the Tevatron which tell us a great deal about the properties of the Higgs.  It is also noteworthy that the searches for a 4th generation of quarks or supersymmetric particles which turned up empty greatly constrained many theoretical models.  Finally, in a weird twist of fate, as of this moment the Higgs itself has run out of places to hide except for one tiny region just tantalizingly out of reach of the Tevatron.  One small upgrade, a few more years of data, and maybe the Higgs would have been ours.

ACU has worked with Fermilab for many years, and we are still running an exciting experiment which will provide amazing insight into what protons are made of.  Even though Fermilab’s collider program is over, they are still using the main proton beam for experiments such as ours, or the experiment which will check (and most likely overturn) the faster-than-light neutrino measurement from OPERA.

NPR has a nice story here, and for more technically-involved but bleaker updates there is live blogging today from the funeral here.