A circle of light shows the location of the underground Tevatron at Batavia's Fermilab, which covered a wide circle through Kane and DuPage counties.  Photo supplied.

Tevatron shutdown ends 26 years of history-making research

After 26 years of colliding particles and providing cutting edge scientific research, Fermilab's Tevatron officially shut down last week.

But analysis and research will continue at the 6,800-acre U.S. laboratory near Batavia.
"Our laboratory has a future of world-class scientific opportunity ahead," said Fermilab director Pier Oddone. "I look forward to working with Fermilab employees, contractors and users, and the national and international scientific communities, to get us there."
The two detector teams that utilize the Tevatron, CDF and DZero, will continue to analyze data and produce scientific papers at the same record-setting rate for the next couple of years and then at a slower rate for another two years.
The laboratory celebrated the accomplishments of the Tevatron, its detectors and those who made and operated them with a ceremony and labwide party last Friday.
The Tevatron shutdown wasn't as dramatic as pulling a plug. Accelerator operators simply stopped putting stores of protons and antiprotons into the Tevatron ring. The last store was to be utilized until it's collision per second rate droped below a useful level and then the remaining particles were be harmlessly diverted into a metal target that will absorb them.
This is a routine process that has been used for annual maintenance shutdowns. Accelerator operators will then warm up the superconducting magnets in the accelerator tunnel for a few days to a week. After that, crews will slowly start removing the fluids and gases. That work should be finished by the end of December.
From 2012 to 2014, Fermilab's primary research focus will shift from the Energy Frontier to the Intensity Frontier, with the construction of new experiments and preparation for new large-scale projects.
In 2012, the laboratory will upgrade several of its 10 detectors. At the Cosmic Frontier, the search will continue for dark-matter particles and the origins of dark energy. Fermilab will also pursue R&D for future particle accelerators and detectors to advance technology, enable future experiments and create innovations for the benefit of society.
During the next several years, scientists on Fermilab's CDF and DZero experiments will continue to analyze  Tevatron data, searching for signs of the Higgs boson and matter-antimatter asymmetries. Fermilab will also remain a strong partner for U.S. collaborators on the Large Hadron Collider experiments at CERN. Fermilab's Remote Operations Center and Grid Computing Center provide access to the LHC's collision data for U.S. scientists.
Certain particle physics experiments require particle beams with incredibly large numbers of particles: the Intensity Frontier. To prepare for new experiments at the Intensity Frontier, Fermilab will upgrade its accelerator complex in 2012. Scientists will retool the complex to create intense particle beams for experiments such as NOvA and MicroBooNE that will explore neutrino interactions and rare subatomic processes.
When the accelerator upgrades are complete, Fermilab will use the world's most intense neutrino beam for the NOvA experiment, a 15,000-ton detector under construction in Minnesota. NOvA scientists expect to record the first neutrino data in 2013. Simultaneously, physicists are advancing the MicroBooNE experiment. It will use a liquid-argon detector to study neutrinos at lower energy than NOvA. Scientists expect construction of the MicroBooNE detector to begin in 2013 and to have first data in 2015.
Using the cosmos as a laboratory, Fermilab scientists will continue to investigate dark matter and dark energy with underground experiments and ground-based telescopes. In 2012, Fermilab will start up the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera, mounted on a telescope in Chile. Scanning about 12 percent of the southern sky, the camera will seek the origins of dark energy by photographing galaxies when they were only a few billion years old. The Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina will continue to search for the origin of the highest-energy cosmic rays.
Operating particle detectors deep underground, Fermilab scientists will continue to search for dark matter. Scientists working on the CDMS experiment at the Soudan Mine in Minnesota will upgrade its detector, making the experiment more sensitive to dark-matter particles. Meanwhile, members of the COUPP collaboration will start operating a 60-kg bubble chamber at Canada's SNOLAB to look for dark-matter particles.
Future Fermilab accelerator R&D will focus on superconducting radio-frequency technology. Fermilab will break ground in fall 2011 for the Illinois Accelerator Research Center, a state-of-the-art facility where scientists and engineers from Fermilab, Argonne and
Illinois universities will work side by side with industrial partners to research and develop breakthroughs in accelerator science and translate them into applications for the nation's health, wealth and security.
In 2013, the laboratory will complete an SRF accelerator test facility, the first of its kind in the United States. In collaboration with industry and other DOE national laboratories, scientists will use SRF components to accelerate a particle beam in this facility.
By 2014, Fermilab plans to complete the technical design for the proposed Project X, a linear accelerator that would use SRF technology to explore new physics at the Intensity Frontier.