When Fermilab’s Tevatron came online in 1983, it was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. Since then, the collider has made countless contributions to the field of particle physics — the most notable being its role in the 1995 discovery of the top quark, the last of the six quarks in the Standard Model of particle physics. Now, it’s about to shoot its last particle beams.
In 2009, the bigger, faster, and more powerful Large Hadron Collider at CERN superseded the Tevatron in just about every way imaginable. Since then, the LHC has largely taken over the Tevatron’s search for the last remaining piece of the Standard Model of physics — the elusive Higgs boson. And today, owing to budgetary constraints within the US Department of Energy, the Tevatron’s dual particle beams will be powered down for the last time.
A live webcast of the shutdown will be broadcast here beginning at 2:45 EDT.
