Tevatron particle accelerator shuts down
Saturday, October 1, 2011 - 00:00
in Physics & Chemistry
Physicist Giovanni Punzi discusses the 4-mile-long accelerator and its shutdown after 26 years of smashing atoms.After smashing atoms together for 26 years, the Tevatron particle accelerator powered down on Friday. The 4-mile-long ring-shaped accelerator, located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., was built to hurl tiny bits of matter at each other in the hopes that they would break apart into the basic building blocks of the universe. Though the Tevatron made major discoveries, it became essentially obsolete after the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva began conducting experiments in 2009.