What’s almost as hot as the LHC? Fermilab’s particle accelerator, the not-quite-so world-famous Tevatron.
Located at the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Batavia, Illinois, the Tevatron is the highest energy synchrotron running experiments until CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is repaired (expected start-up date is Nov 2009) and makes it obsolete. Fermilab has already taken their baby through its growing pains, though. The $120 million project was completed in 1983 and has been upgraded several times since, including the Main Injector which cost $290 million and came online in 1999.
Tevatron project at Fermilab in Illinois
Similar to the the LHC, the Tevatron swings particles around in a 6300 m (almost 4 mi) circuit and crashes them together to study the results. 1000 super-conducting magnets, kept cold by liquid helium, are used to steer the particles until they are collided or dumped. The magnetic field created by these magnets running at 980 GeV is about 4.2 Tesla. That’s 14,000 times as strong as the Earth’s magnetic field!
This hunky chunk of machinery may yet stand in the shadow of the LHC, but it’s already blown its successor out of the water as far as discoveries go. In 1995, the CDF and DZero experiments announced the discovery of the top quark, narrowing the measurement of its mass to within 1% by 2007. They also observed two types of sigma baryon in 2006 and detected a “double strange” Omega baryon in Sept. 2008. Unless the LHC gets back online and starts running experiments soon, the Tevatron may beat it to the Higgs boson, too. In March of 2009, DZero reportedly excluded the Higgs from having a mass between 160 and 170 GeV/c² and scientists estimate a 50% chance of discovering the actual particle by the end of 2009.
So, for all those who are concerned about black holes swallowing the planet… Particle smashing experiments have been going on longer than I’ve been alive and we’re still here. As long as the scientists don’t make an oops with those calculations, we may even get a new Standard Model out of the deal!
