A group of high-energy particle physicists decided this week to recommend extending the life of the Tevatron, the second-most-powerful particle collider in the world, for 3 years.

The panel's recommendation goes to the Department of Energy, then Congress and ultimately to the White House. The funding decision could determine whether the United States or Europe wins the race to find the theoretical Higgs boson. It all comes down to $105 million, a tiny amount relative to the billions spent building the massive particle colliders competing for the find.

The Tevatron at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, is potentially powerful enough to confirm or deny the existence of the Higgs boson, which would help explain the origin of mass in the universe. But the machine needs more time, and its scheduled September 2011 shutdown would almost certainly allow Europe's new, more powerful Large Hadron Colliderto get there first.

The LHC, run by CERN in Geneva, will have more than enough energy to find the Higgs, says Robert Roser, an experimental physicist at Fermilab. But mechanical breakdowns set the project's start date back for more than a year, to September 2008, and prompted CERN to ramp the LHC up far more slowly, and to just half its top energy, before a 16-month shutdown to fix faulty magnets planned for December 2011. This leaves a window open for the Tevatron to catch the Higgs first, if it isn't shuttered first.

The 15 members of the U.S. particle-physics community who gathered in Washington, D.C., this week voted 14 to 1 in favor of giving the Tevatron 3 more years. The machine costs around $50 million per year to run. Fermilab has agreed to come up with $15 million annually, which will be diverted from other scientific projects.

“Now it’s up those people [at the DOE] to work together to figure out how to get $35 million per year out of the budget,” Roser said. “With a $4.7 billion total [DOE] Office of Science budget, I’m hoping it won’t be that hard. But we’ll see.”

Ultimately, the decision is up to the Barack Obama administration, whose budget is due out in February 2011. If approved, the 3.9-mile-long circular collider will be allowed to gather data and sift for signs of the Higgs through 2014.

“Finding the Higgs is kind of like a casino. The more chances you have at pulling the slot machine, the more chances you have of winning the jackpot,” Roser said. “Data buys us probability, and that will increase our odds of coming up with a significant result.”

If the scientists’ extension request fails, the LHC can pick up where the Tevatron left off in 2013 with seven times the particle-colliding power, which is more than enough to squeeze the Higgs out of hiding, if it exists. But this could take several more years than it would to find it with the Tevatron, which is running better than it ever has, despite being well beyond its designed life expectancy.

“Right now we have a track record of success. Only in the last year has the Tevatron been in the Higgs game, where we’re able to make statements about the Higgs particle,” Roser said. “It would be a shame to be in that regime and just turn it off.”

Ultimately, finding the Higgs would be the best supporting evidence yet for the Standard Model of Physics – the guidebook to the particles and forces at work in the universe.

“We’re trying to understand how mass fits into the Standard Model, and it’s perhaps the single most important question facing our field right now,” Roser said. “We need to use every tool available to solve it.”

*Images: Fermilab/Fred Ulrich 1) The Tevatron with Wilson Hall in the background. 2) The Collider Detector at Fermilab, one of the Tevatron's two detectors. *

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