Roger Dixon gestures, bringing his hand alarmingly close to the big red button that has the power to shut down one of the world's most powerful particle accelerators forever. "It's already hooked up," he says, in response to my nervous questions.
We are standing in a room full of blinking displays and control panels at Fermi National Laboratory (Fermilab), which nestles among cornfields outside Chicago. Dixon, who is in charge of the smooth running of the accelerator, the Tevatron, pulls his hand back.
Once king, the Tevatron is due to shut down on 30 September as it can no longer compete with the energies achieved by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. "It is being superseded," admits Fermilab director Pier Oddone.
For years, Fermilab hoped the Tevatron would find the Higgs boson, the particle thought to endow all others with mass. It has not, and that task has now passed to the LHC. Instead the Tevatron will likely be remembered most for its discovery in 1995 of the top quark, the last of the six quarks in the standard model of particle physics to be seen. But just as the Higgs spotlight moves away from Fermilab, another, potentially equally exciting particle may thrust the lab into the limelight again.
Last week, the OPERA experiment rocked the foundations of physics when it reported subatomic particles called neutrinos apparently breaking the light-speed barrier (see "'Light-speed' neutrinos point to new physical reality"). As it turns out, Fermilab's existing neutrino experiment, MINOS, is well suited to confirming or ruling out this bizarre observation. MINOS fires neutrino beams of an energy similar to those detected at OPERA to a detector in the Soudan mine, 800 kilometres away in Minnesota.
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