The world's science superpower may no longer possess the world's most powerful particle smasher, but it isn't giving up the ghost.
Last week, in the wake of September's shutdown of the Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, 500 US physicists met at a workshop in Rockville, Maryland. They were there to discuss their prospects for making major breakthroughs in the context of a government that is increasingly strapped for cash, and without the mighty Tevatron, which was shut down because it could not compete with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Geneva in Switzerland.
The initiatives discussed at the workshop could reshape the pace and type of discoveries that are made about our universe. "The enthusiasm and the energy at the workshop is palpable," said Persis Drell, director of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Stanford, California, speaking from the meeting on 2 December.
On the upside are US experiments that are poised to shed light on several of the most burning questions in physics, such as whether neutrinos really do break the cosmic speed limit and the identity of dark matter, the stubbornly mysterious substance that makes up 80 per cent of the universe's matter.
On the downside, the most ambitious physics experiment currently under consideration in the US hangs in the balance due to tight budget constraints. The Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE) would be the biggest ever to measure a beam of neutrinos and could solve a mystery at the heart of antimatter, but it may prove too costly for a frugal Congress.
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