What's next: After Tevatron

On October 13, 1985 at Fermilab, the Tevatron produced protons and antiprotons collisions inside the CDF detector for the very first time. It was a magical day for the few dozen people in the accelerator and CDF control rooms. Since that day, literally billions of matter-antimatter collisions took place inside CDF and then inside CDF and DZero. What was once novel is now routine – and routine at an unprecedented scale. The intensity of the beams gradually multiplied, thanks to the relentless efforts of the Tevatron accelerator physicists.

Friday at 2 p.m., after nearly 26 years of operation, a switch will be turned, ending the career of one of the most remarkably successful colliders ever in particle physics. The Tevatron collider established a brand identity for Fermilab and changed the physics landscape forever... 

- Rob Roser and Giovanni Punzi, Fermilab

Tevatron.  Courtesy: Fermilab

The Tevatron has it share of important particle physics discoveries.  It has been said that the accelerator has done its job well.  It accomplished what it was built for.  However, physicists were a bit disappointed since they could not get a whiff of new physics from the Tevatron, or at least find the Higgs boson.

The Tevatron hosted two detectors, CDF and D0.  Both the CDF and D0 detector takes snapshots of the particles that emerge when protons and antiprotons collide.  This collision produces a gezillion amount of particles that physicists will have to sieve through and find the ones that we have never seen before.  The Tevatron discovered

• the top quark and determined its mass to a high precision
• two distinct production mechanisms for the top quark: pair and single production
• five B baryons (2 cascade, 1 omega and 2 sigma _b)
• Bc meson
• Y(4140), a new quark structure
• Bs oscillation

source: Fermilab

So now, it is up to the LHC@Cern to find the Higgs boson, or something to replace it.  For the near future, the data generated by the Tevatron will be analyzed by physicists.  A new accelerator research center will also be built at the CDF site.  For those interested to watch the closing ceremony, here is the link.  The show starts at 2pm GMT-5.

Note:  Top quarks are very massive, as heavy as a Gold atom. It requires large amounts of energy are needed to create one and the only way to achieve such high energies is through high energy collisions. These occur naturally in the Earth's upper atmosphere as cosmic rays collide with particles in the air, or can be created in a particle accelerator. As of 2011, the only operational accelerators that generate beams of sufficient energy to produce top quarks are the Tevatron at Fermilab, in which protons and antiprotons are collided and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.