The Last Days of the Tevatron

[beamjockey]

The press has been commenting on the imminent shutoff of the Tevatron.

Nature; DeKalb Daily Chronicle, National Public Radio.

Here's a Tevatron timeline and Fermilab's plans for the future.

Here's a rundown of notable physics results from the Tevatron's years of operation (but I'm sorry to see the tau neutrino omitted from this list).

I understand the U.S. House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee will visit Fermilab next Wednesday and hear testimony.

Comments

[marsgov.livejournal.com]

And your take on FTL neutrios?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

As I wrote elsewhere: Neutrinos have always been my friends. I feel confident they would not do such a thing to me and to Dr. Einstein.

(Hold your fire until an arxiv.org URL is published, at least.)

[marsgov.livejournal.com]

Yeah, more or less ny reaction.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Which would you rather have: a nice shiny anisble, or Causality?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

You're just itching to post your book reviews to the Net of a Million Lies, aren't you?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

(But if Causality is gone, maybe everyone's already read them.)

[le-trombone.livejournal.com]

Pfft. Causality. What has causality ever done for you?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 you mean?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

I am so glad we have far-flung agents who are diligently scanning the Internet for us while the rest of us are asleep.

[acmespaceship.livejournal.com]

You guys have probably seen this already, but just in case and for the record:

[marsgov.livejournal.com]

Seen it, but of course it never hurts to be sure...

[thinkum]

Love the comments on this post. :-)

And that's the perfect icon, too!

[dd-b.livejournal.com]

Must be frustrating for them to have evidence of something they don't believe is happening, that they can't make disappear (within accepted norms of behavior, I mean).

Which shouldn't overshadow the Tevatron shutdown. It seems premature to me, but that was fought out long ago, and they decided to stop supporting it.

And, how does this affect you? Job, and all?

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

In a nutshell, Fermilab keeps on doing physics with several smaller accelerators, such as the Main Injector.

There remains plenty of work to do. My job, at the moment, involves evaluating shielding for future operations and new facilities. So I haven't been involved directly with the Tevatron for some time.

Near the beginning, I spent two years running test stands. As they were building a thousand magnets for the Tevatron (plus spares) the crew I was on cooled each one down, powered it up, deliberately quenched it a few times-- that was fun-- and performed enough measurements on it to fill a two-inch binder. So, in my own small way, I helped build the Tevatron.