Tevatron

The Tevatron was a circular <a href="/facts/Particle_accelerator/Pkuc08xC">particle accelerator</a> (active until 2011) in the <a href="/facts/United_States/P0sCdLe5">United States</a>, at the <a href="/facts/Fermilab/8yyTx3oj">Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory</a> (called Fermilab), east of <a href="/facts/Batavia,_Illinois/lYsKuBGM">Batavia, Illinois</a>, and was the highest energy particle collider until the <a href="/facts/Large_Hadron_Collider/XWJCFSqT">Large Hadron Collider</a> (LHC) of the <a href="/facts/CERN/y1gwRchm">European Organization for Nuclear Research</a> (CERN) was built near <a href="/facts/Geneva,_Switzerland/14gXxjcq">Geneva, Switzerland</a>. The Tevatron was a <a href="/facts/Synchrotron/J1oWBgbU">synchrotron</a> that accelerated <a href="/facts/Proton/clCjepXP">protons</a> and <a href="/facts/Antiproton/dLqJkhGQ">antiprotons</a> in a 6.28 km (3.90 mi) circumference ring to energies of up to 1 <a href="/facts/TeV/YMT1fqX9">TeV</a>, hence its name. The Tevatron was completed in 1983 at a cost of $120 million and significant upgrade investments were made during its active years of 1983–2011.
The main achievement of the Tevatron was the discovery in 1995 of the <a href="/facts/Top_quark/82qd7NPI">top quark</a>—the last <a href="/facts/Elementary_particle/CTFDM97U">fundamental fermion</a> predicted by the <a href="/facts/Standard_Model/LhVGf9ow">Standard Model</a> of particle physics. On July 2, 2012, scientists of the <a href="/facts/Collider_Detector_at_Fermilab/HcqPvu9s">CDF</a> and <a href="/facts/D0_experiment/SdFhS8aq">DØ</a> collider experiment teams at <a href="/facts/Fermilab/8yyTx3oj">Fermilab</a> announced the findings from the analysis of around 500 trillion collisions produced from the Tevatron collider since 2001, and found that the existence of the suspected <a href="/facts/Higgs_boson/3LAYXfft">Higgs boson</a> was highly likely with a confidence of 99.8%, later improved to over 99.9%.
The Tevatron ceased operations on 30 September 2011, due to budget cuts and because of the completion of the LHC, which began operations in early 2010 and is far more powerful (planned energies were two 7 TeV beams at the LHC compared to 1 TeV at the Tevatron). The main ring of the Tevatron will probably be reused in future experiments, and its components may be transferred to other particle accelerators.

Tevatron open-in-new

Tevatron