The Tevatron collider in Illinois may get a three-year life extension (Image: Fermilab)

The ageing Tevatron particle smasher can still compete with the upstart Large Hadron Collider, says a committee of physicists that has recommended keeping the older accelerator alive for three more years. But its director has not yet endorsed the idea, which would delay other experiments planned at the lab.

The Tevatron, near Chicago, Illinois, has been crashing particles together since 1983.

It is officially set to shut down in September 2011, but a panel of physicists that advises Fermilab, the institution that manages the Tevatron, says it should be run until 2014, according to a report (pdf) issued on Wednesday.


It is still possible for the Tevatron to beat the LHC, based in Geneva, Switzerland, to spotting the Higgs boson, which is thought to endow other particles with mass, says Richard Van Kooten of Indiana University in Bloomington, who chairs the advisory committee.

And even if the LHC is first to see the Higgs, the Tevatron is more sensitive to studying the decay of the Higgs into fundamental particles called quarks. This decay process may be particularly helpful in elucidating how the Higgs generates mass, he says.

But it is not clear where the $150 million would come from to keep the Tevatron running for three more years.

Opportunity cost

“I do not support squeezing the funds for an extension of the run out of the rest of the high-energy physics community,” Pier Oddone, Fermilab’s director, wrote in a commentary posted online.

Despite his support for extending the Tevatron, Van Kooten is keen to avoid cutting back on US participation in the LHC, as is Oddone. “That would just be shooting ourselves in the foot,” Van Kooten says.

He hopes the Department of Energy, the main funding agency for particle physics in the US, will boost its overall particle physics budget in order to pay for the extension. But that would mean cutting back on one of the agency’s other priorities, like renewable energy research.

Meanwhile, an extension would delay Fermilab’s other projects, including the Nova experiment, which is designed to help pin down the masses of neutrinos. That’s because Nova would require the accelerator to be shut down and upgraded, a process that would have to be postponed by 1.5 years to enable the Tevatron to keep searching for the Higgs.

Van Kooten says the decision on the extension is now in the hands of Fermilab’s management and the Department of Energy, and could take a few months.