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The second most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the Tevatron, pride of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Batavia, Illinois), won't be able to continue operations beyond September of this year, due to a lack of funds that would have kept it operational until 2014.
The announcement by the U.S. Department of Energy has drastically reduced the hopes of the Fermilab researchers of being the first to confirm experimentally the existence of the Higgs boson, often dramatically called the "particle of God". This is an elementary particle, the existence of which, is fundamental for the standard model of particle physics, that describes the origin of matter immediately after the Big Bang.
The Higgs boson (carrier of a field capable of conferring mass to the other particles) would have a mass of its own, but the standard model does not predict the value, which is what the experiments attempt to determine. The Tevetron has been at the cutting edge of this search, and having worked at energies sufficiently high to detect the particle since 2003, has accumulated a quantity of data that has made it possible to limit the energy range occupied by the products of the super-rapid decay of the boson.
The chances of the Tevatron confirming the existence of the "particle of God" before 2014 were very good, but by now it seems certain, that if the boson exists, it will be CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva that will make the breakthrough, may be even before its long maintenance shut down due to begin in 2013.
The advantage of the Tevatron over the LHC, apart from the quantity of data accumulated, has always been that it contains more particles in its beam (the "intensity"), something which is more important than the greater energies reached by the LHC (7 TeV versus 2 TeV). But now the intensities are already similar, and when the LHC increases its intensity by a factor of at least ten next March, the destiny of the two colliders will diverge completely.
The sadness of the physicists and astrophysicists is sharpened by the fact that the Tevatron and LHC aim to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson in two different ways. The first searches for the bottom quark and its anti-particle, decay products of the boson, while the second is based around a rarer decay path that produces two photons. The complementary nature of the two experiments, once they had reached their goals, would have provided a very complete picture of this fundamental particle.
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