The Recycling of the Tevatron 71
ananyo writes with an excerpt from an article in Nature about the decomissioning of the Tevatron: "It is a 4,000-tonne edifice that stands three stories high, chock full of particle detectors, power supplies, electronics and photomultiplier tubes, all layered like a giant onion around a cylindrical magnet. During 26 years of operation at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, this behemoth, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF), helped to find the top quark and chased the Higgs boson. But since the lab's flagship particle collider, the Tevatron, was switched off in September 2011, the detector has been surplus stock — and it is now slowly being cannibalized for parts."
Currently other projects are taking small bits and pieces of the Tevatron, but another Fermilab project, ORKA, wants to gut the collider to study kaon decay.
Minimal saving grace? (Score:5, Insightful)
The lack of funding for the Tevatron is deeply unfortunate. It almost certainly could still have been used for good research. Between this and the earlier cancellation of the SSC, the US seems to be doing its hardest to make sure that it isn't first in particle physics research. We're still doing a lot of good research at Fermilab. For example, MINOS is working on testing the recent FTL neutrino claim (and in fact, the OPERA group was paying careful attention to arrival times primarily because MINOS had previously discovered an anomaly which tentatively suggested that some neutrinos might be traveling faster than light). And the US is still doing very good physics in other areas, especially in solid state physics and plasma physics. But this a really bad trend. It fits into the same pattern as the recent budget cuts to Mars exploration, while we still have billions of dollars pumping into military boondoggles.
I'm happy that they can at least reuse the Tevatron, and kaon decay which is important for understanding CP violation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation [wikipedia.org] which may have implications for why there's apparently so much more matter than antimatter in the universe. But it really shouldn't be coming to this. Physicists shouldn't be desperately scrambling for parts while the cost of what they need is less than a new fighter squadron.
Re:Uh, Ok? (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm confused why this is news. Can I buy the parts or something? What does it matter if they're selling the parts.
Woah! So it's not news or interesting unless you are *directly* affected? Generation Me [wikipedia.org] or what, dude? They're taking apart one of your nation's national treasures. Bits of it are being recommissioned because your physicists are broke. It's OK, you're right. Let's leave this "peer into the fabric of the universe and wonder at its awesomeness" stuff up to the Europeans. They'll have the Higgs by the end of the year anyway.