Major U.S. atom smasher closes

The Tevatron, which was once the world's largest particle accelerator, is closing for good on Friday, AFP reports.

The enormous machine, a four-mile underground ring about 50 miles west of Chicago, began its work in 1985, as part of the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. Tevatron has since given up the title of world's most powerful atom smasher to the Large Hadron Collider, built on the French-Swiss border by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN).

From AFP:

But in its day, the Tevatron made some major contributions, including the identification of the top quark in 1995 and the discovery in 2000 of the tau neutrino, an elusive piece of the Standard Model of Physics.

The Washington Post said that Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, the Energy Department facility that operates the Tevatron, was scheduled to give the shutdown order at 2 p.m.

“That will be it,” Gregorio Bernardi, a Fermilab physicist, told the Post. “Then we’ll have a big party.”

The Post offered more details about the Tevatron's successes:

Conceived in the 1970s as an audacious effort to probe the subatomic realm, the Tevatron discovered three of the 17 particles thought fundamental to the universe. It became a prime training ground for two generations of young physicists. And in 1995, it bagged its biggest success, finding a subatomic particle called the top quark, the last of six fundamental building blocks of matter to be discovered.

The BBC wondered if the Tevatron's closure, along with the recent ending of the space shuttle program, means that "perhaps America is slowly pulling down the shutters on its dominance across a number of disciplines." Patrick Clemins, director of the research and development budget and policy program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, disagreed.

"I think what people would say is that we are experiencing a lot more competition than we have in the past," Clemins said. "A lot of countries have learned from our growth over the past decades and are implementing some of the same policies to grow their own scientific infrastructures."