Farewell, Tevatron
One of the world's most powerful atom smashers, the Tevatron, shut down Friday (Sept. 30), with the event streaming live online.
The atom smasher is located at the Fermilab physics laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Inside the accelerator, particles are ramped up to near light speed as they zip around a 4-mile (6.3-kilometer) ring. When two particles collide, they disintegrate into other exotic particles in a powerful outpouring of energy.
While it was once the most powerful atom smasher, the Tevatron has recently been surpassed by the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The Tevatron is shutting down for budget reasons. [Twisted Physics: 7 Mind-Blowing Findings]
Tevatron's end came a little after 3:30 p.m. ET, as Fermilab physicist Helen Edwards pushed two specially-constructed buttons, one red and one blue. The red button shut down the collision of protons and anti-protons in the Tevatron. The blue button shut off the electrical current to the accelerator.
That one, Edwards had to push twice. "It didn't want to give up so easy," said Bob Mau, the head of the accelerator division operation department at Fermilab, who was leading the live-streamed shut-down.
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