

At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths - hardtke
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/science/06particle.html

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bengebre
This stood out to me:

"a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most
powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September
or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it."

I don't know the backstory here, so I won't jump to conclusions. Is there a
reason besides lack of funds for shutting this place down?

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bradgessler
How do they decommission a lab like Fermi? Does private industry by the
particle accelerator and use it for some other applications?

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harshpotatoes
The lab itself will stay there. Only one experiment is being shut down (D0 at
the tevatron. Granted when people think Fermilab, they think tevatron, but
there are other experiments located there). They have future plans for a new
accelerator located at the tevatron location.

I assume that most of the technology will have to be scrapped, and the only
thing that would be reused would be the tunnels.

<http://projectx.fnal.gov/index.shtml>

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retube
Ex particle-physicist here. Extremely unlikely to be a new force of nature,
given the energies that the Tevatron operates at we'd have seen some evidence
for this before - and nothing has ever suggested there might be something like
this in addition to the fundamental 4. And whilst there might be wild
speculation in the press as to what this might be, the research group(s) at
Tevatron will certainly know. Given that one of the Tevatron's big hopes was
to trump the LHC with a signature for the Higgs it could be something along
these things, which would be fantastic. Although it's probably likely to be
something more mundane.

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meemo
Which is the paper mentioned in the article?

<http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+Punzi/0/1/0/all/0/1>

[http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+punzi+lett/0/1/0/all/0/...](http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+punzi+lett/0/1/0/all/0/1)

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ugh
The New York Times has thankfully started to link to sources and papers and
actually does so in this article. Here is the paper:
<http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0699>

Links in the text are always a bit cryptic, it would help if they were to put
an info box at the end of articles with all the relevant links — but I don't
want to complain, putting the link in there at all is already a pretty
masssive improvement.

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meemo
Thanks. The link in the article was edited after my submission. When I posted
the link was only to arxiv.org.

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Tichy
I hope the new force in nature is not this: "Fermilab’s Tevatron [...] now
slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out
of money to operate it"

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rodmiranda13
These Particle Accelerators should not be wasted or scrapped! This process
could be used to study materials, which could lead to advances in: temperature
limits, strength, etc...

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jff
Operating equipment like a particle accelerator is surely not cheap. If they
decide that it would be better to share time on newer equipment rather than
face the rising maintenance costs of older, less capable equipment, scrapping
it is likely the best option.

