UPDATE: Fermilab Tevatron Shutdown Sparks Mixed Emotions

“Bittersweet” was the word on everyone’s lips today at , as staff permanently after 28 years of nearly continuous operation.

“It has been a really magical time for the Tevatron,” said Fermilab Director Pier Oddone, who spoke to reporters at a press conference preceding the shutdown ceremony. “It had a fantastic run of physics discoveries, including the top quark, the third neutrino, five baryons and the W boson (subatomic particles). Now CERN (Europe’s nuclear research facility) has taken up the torch of high-energy physics, and we’re entering a new era of precision physics.”

The Tevatron—and with it, Fermilab and the United States—dominated global physics research between 1983, when it first started operating as a fixed-target accelerator, and 2010, when CERN’s large hadron collider came online after a few false starts. Scientists from all over the world came to conduct experiments in Batavia, often bringing their families and moving here permanently.

Over, But Not Overseas

Now American scientists are making the reverse commute, going to Switzerland to work at the LHC, said Rick Field, a University of Florida theoretical physicist. Field, who worked on Fermilab’s Collision Detector project until it ended today, has been helping conduct experiments at CERN since the LHC came online.

“We all worked on this experiment, so now we’re here saying goodbye,” said Field in the collision detector building, surrounded by colleagues cheering and sipping champagne. “It’s not really a happy day, but we’re trying to pretend it is. This is the end of high-energy physics in the U.S. There are still physicists here working on the data we collected here, but many of the younger scientists are moving to Europe to work at the LHC, and some of them will never come back.”

Many researchers will be able to access the LHC without leaving Fermilab, noted Communications Director Kurt Riesselmann.

“We have a part to play in the LHC’s operation,” he said, adding that Fermilab built many components of the cutting-edge collider. “There’s a direct connection to it in our control room that lets us run it from here. People will still be conducting high-energy experiments at Fermilab, even though the collider will be in Switzerland.”

In the next few months, workers will salvage the Tevatron’s superconducting magnets and other usable components to use in other Fermilab projects.

The Tevatron ring and remaining equipment will be opened for public tours and school field trips for the next few years, Oddone said. Eventually it will be dismantled and scrapped.

The LHC’s successful deployment and increased federal budget pressure led the U.S. Department of Energy .

Leader In A New School

Officials are now repositioning Fermilab to lead the world in high-intensity physics, studying how greater quantities of subatomic particles interact at lower energy levels, Oddone said.

Fermilab already has taken the lead in neutrino research by building the equipment to shoot high-energy beams of neutrinos hundreds of miles underground to let scientists study how they decay. The NOVA project, now under construction, will send neutrino beams 500 miles to a detector in Ash River, MN. The DUSEL project will send beams into a defunct mine near Soudan, SD.

The two projects will run at least through 2020, Oddone said.

And the key to the facility’s long-term viability is on the drawing board. Dubbed , it’s a linear accelerator that will power experiments in several different fields, from neutrino research to muon and other large-particle exploration. When it goes online in 2019, it will essentially replace the Tevatron, Oddone said.

“Our foundation cannot be the present front end accelerator that is 40 years old,” he asserted in January. “Project X will take us into the next several decades.”

Oddone admitted today, though, that the federal government has not yet committed to funding Project X.

“The world will come and help us build it,” he predicted. “It will be such a good deal that the agencies won’t be able to say no.”

Success In Science

In the meantime, staff and visiting scientists dwelled with pride on the Tevatron’s successes, especially its spinoff benefits. The technology invented to build the Tevatron and the medical uses for the protons it created produce $500 billion worth of products and services each year, said Fermilab Director Stuart Henderson.

Among the products sparked by the Tevatron project are:

• magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines
• high-level computer chips 
• proton therapy for cancer patients

“Now we’ll develop a new type of technology to enable a new type of particle accelerator, which will certainly lead to new industrial applications,” Henderson said.

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