...Particle
For nearly three decades, the United States has hosted the world's most powerful particle collider – a critical tool scientists use to probe the nature of matter and the origins of the universe.
This week, the director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which operates the machine, announced that the lab would pull the plug on the device, known as the Tevatron, at the end of the current fiscal year...
I'll bet that's a darn big plug.
...But last summer, researchers at Fermilab announced that a much-sought elementary particle that the LHC also has on its Most Wanted list – a particle known as the Higgs boson, and sometimes called the "God particle" – might be within reach of collision energies the Tevatron was achieving at Fermilab. The Higgs boson is a hypothesized particle associated with a quantum field that imparts mass...
Kind of like fusion reactors. Always just around the corner.
But to take advantage of the new information, the lab would have to keep the Tevatron running for up to three more years. In the end, the US Department of Energy was unable to find the money without threatening the health of other research programs the high-energy physics community had set as priorities.In a letter to the chairman of the DOE's High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP), which had looked at options for extending the Tevatron's run, William Brinkman, DOE's director of science, explained that "the current budgetary climate is very challenging and additional funding had not been identified."
This is really sad, but we really do have to do something about the budget. The Higgs boson will still be there (if it exists at all) after we get that straight.
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