Three-year extension recommended for Tevatron - physicsworld.com
New lease on life for Tevatron in order to beat CERN to the Higgs Boson…
Fermilab’s Tevatron collider looks set for a new lease on life following a campaign to keep the facility running beyond the end of 2011. A report by Fermilab’s Physics Advisory Committee (PAC) due to be released later today is expected to recommend that collisions at the Tevatron continue until 2014 – long enough, say advocates, to search the entire range of likely masses for the Higgs boson, and perhaps even find the first evidence of its existence.
Pressure to keep the Tevatron running has been building for months thanks to a combination of factors, including the 15 month shutdown of the rival Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN for repairs as well as a continued stream of results from the Tevatron’s two main detector experiments, CDF and D0. In late July, a group of 37 US physicists unaffiliated with Fermilab sent a letter to Energy Secretary Steve Chu, asking the Department of Energy (DOE) to support an extension. “We feel there’s a lot to be gained from running the Tevatron for a few more years,” says Harvard University theorist Lisa Randall, one of the letter’s signatories. “It is running incredibly well, and from a pure physics standpoint, it would be such a loss to stop now”.