(Image source: Fermilab)

BY STEVEN SPARKMAN

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The United States is set to lose its largest particle accelerator this September due to a tight budget. Researchers were hoping the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab could claim one last major discovery, but their request for future funding was denied. The New York Times explains.

“For the last year the Tevatron and the CERN collider have been engaged in a race to discover, among other things, the Higgs. By all accounts the Tevatron, with a 20-year head start, was ahead. … But the squeeze is on science budgets, and the continuation of the Tevatron was not to be.”

Though the shutdown came amid optimism the Tevatron could find the Higgs-Boson, the particle that gives matter its mass, no one expected it to outperform Switerzland’s Large Hadron Collider much longer. Physicist Michio Kaku predicted last October on C-Span Fermilab's days of atom smashing were numbered.

“That machine is old. Eventually it’ll be shut down. It is the second largest machine, but the Large Hadron Collider today is way beyond the Fermilab. So the Fermilab will eventually become probably a museum of sorts.”

The news is disappointing to physics buffs who hoped the Higgs would be discovered in the U.S. But PopSci explains -- national pride aside, it’s better for science in general if Fermilab and CERN aren’t competing with one another.

“Tevatron and the LHC were kind of redundant, and the DOE (Department of Energy) and HEP (High Energy Physics) program are respectfully bowing out of the Higgs race to focus on other aspects of particle physics that aren’t already being probed by more powerful experiments elsewhere in the world.”

Tevatron’s closing doesn’t mean the end of particle physics in the U.S., but it does signal a change in direction. The Beacon-News reports Fermilab’s director will push to make the facility the leader in other kinds of particle physics.

“As Fermilab was a leader in the ‘energy’ frontier, it will shift and be leader in the ‘intensity’ frontier... Fermilab’s strategy, he said, is to develop the most powerful set of facilities in the world for the study of neutrinos ‘way beyond the present state-of-the-art’ and complimentary to the LHC.”

So, are you disappointed that the so-called “god particle” probably won’t be found in the U.S., or are you still holding out hope it’ll be found before September? Share your thoughts on the race for the Higgs in our comments section.

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