Tevatron particle accelerator closing

The European CERN has made the Tevatron particle accelerator obsolete.

(PHYSORG)- The era of big American physics ends Friday with the retirement of the Tevatron particle accelerator, which has been recreating the Big Bang under four miles of Illinois prairie for 25 years.

The Tevatron has been rendered obsolete by a more powerful atom smasher -- the world's largest -- built in the Alps on the French-Swiss border by the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), a consortium of 20 member nations.

It seems unlikely that the United States, which once dominated the field and reaped the rewards of discoveries and technological innovations, will be able to muster the resources to build the next big particle physics project.

Long-term funding is simply too hard to come by.

Instead, American physicists will concentrate on more precise -- and less expensive -- questions at home and work with CERN on high-energy projects like the search for the elusive 'God' particle.
"In our field we don't keep beating our heads if we have been outdone by another machine," said Pier Oddone, director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which operates the Tevatron.