Image of the Day - Tevatron

Today's Image of the Day for 3/10/11 - Tevatron

Tevatron courtesy of visualmedia.fnal

One of the world's most powerful "atom smashers", at the leading edge of scientific discovery for a quarter of a century, has been shut down. The Tevatron facility near Chicago fired its last particle beams on Friday after federal funding ran out. Housed in a 6km-long circular tunnel under the Illinois prairie, the Tevatron leaves behind a rich scientific legacy. Since 1985, engineers have been accelerating bunches of proton and antiproton particles around the Tevatron's main ring at close to the speed of light, then smashing them together in a bid to unlock the secrets of the Universe. This includes finding nature's heaviest elementary particle: the top quark. But the Tevatron has been superseded by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - located on the French-Swiss border - which is capable of getting to much higher energies than the US machine. The Tevatron's main ring is likely to be used in other experiments, and components may be transferred to other accelerators, with Fermilab concentrating on smaller-scale experiments such as Project X - an effort to develop ever more intense particle beams.