The crisis reaches the particle accelerators. TheTevatron circular accelerator, the American equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at European CERN, which recreated the Big Bang for almost 26 years, closes its doors today due to lack of funding.
“The idea is to focus on those areas where we can make the greatest contributions,” said Pier Oddone, director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), which operates the Tevatron, in reference to CERN’s current supremacy.
Over more than two decades, the Tevatron has made great contributions to particle physics. The highlight was undoubtedlythe 1995 discovery of the top quark, a rare elemental particle. Furthermore, in 2000 he discovered theneutrino tauónico (o tau-neutrino), a particle of the group of leptons that has a mass one million times less than the electron. And in 2007 the measurement of the mass of the type quark was achieved with an accuracy very close to 1 percent. Another advance that the Tevatron allowed is thewidespread use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for medical diagnosis. “No one imagined that there would be spin-offs to the project that would ultimately be important in saving the life of his wife or his daughter or his grandmother … yet that is exactly what happened,” said Stuart Henderson, deputy director. del Fermilab, in statements to the AFP agency.
The next big discovery at Fermilab could emerge from three new projects: a camera fordetect dark energy, which would explain the accelerated expansion of the cosmos; a neutrino beam that could help explainwhy the Universe has more matter than antimatter; and theProject X, intended to create theproton acceleratormost powerful in the world.
