Tomorrow, the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab will shut down. The end will be no song and dance: the accelerator operators will simply stop putting new protons and antiprotons into the machine. The last few particles will whiz around the accelerator until the number of collisions per second drops below a useful level, after which [...]

When NASA flew the shuttle prototype Enterprise through New York City last year, all we had to do was look out our windows at Scientific American one morning to watch it cruise past. Countless Americans got a look at one of the decommissioned shuttles as NASA paraded them around the country en route to their [...]

By now the huge Higgs news out of CERN is no longer news. The apparent discovery of the Higgs boson has been rehashed countless times in the three-plus weeks since physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) outside Geneva announced they had found a new particle with a strong resemblance to the long-sought Higgs. What [...]

VANCOUVER—Last fall, the Tevatron accelerator at Fermilab in Illinois shut down for good. The long-running accelerator had been eclipsed by the vastly more powerful Large Hadron Collider outside of Geneva, Switzerland, which since 2010 has been generating data at an impressive rate. The move appeared to quash any hopes that Fermilab had of discovering the Higgs [...]

Fermilab is dead. Long live Fermilab! The Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., which had been the top U.S. particle collider—and for many years the most powerful such machine in the world—shut down last September. The collider’s physics breakthroughs, including the 1995 discovery of the top quark, were so eminent that [...]

The storied Tevatron particle collider, the most powerful machine of its kind in the U.S. and for many years in the world, will smash its final protons and antiprotons Friday. The collider, which came online in 1983, accelerates particles to near light speed on a six-kilometer racetrack before steering them into head-on collisions. At those [...]

It has been a rough 2011 for the physicists working on the Tevatron, the top particle collider in the U.S. and the second most powerful in the world after Europe’s Large Hadron Collider. On January 10, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which operates the Tevatron, announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) had denied a [...]