The Tevatron, the huge particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, is being shut down after twenty-six years of research in the field of particle physics.

The name is due to the fact that the Tevatron accelerates protons and antiprotons in a ring of 6.28 km (3.9 miles) up to 1 TeV energy. The original accelerator was built in 1983 and over the years it was upgraded several times, particularly in 1994 when the main injector was added. It was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world until in 2009 the Large Hadron Collider was put into operation.

In the course of twenty-six years the Tevatron has contributed to a number of scientific discoveries, in particular the observation of various particles. Its construction and its updates pushed the progress of various technologies as a particle accelerator requires many different kinds of very sophisticated equipment.

We all know the current state of the economy and with the activation of the Large Hadron Collider the will to keep on financing the activities of the Tevatron disappeared. The problem is the usual: the cost is high and common people don’t understand its usefulness so in the present circumstances it’s easy to cut off funding. Yet, especially for Americans, the budget to run the Tevatron was only a small fraction of the military budget.

Now the Tevatron operations will end but the data obtained will keep on being analyzed by the teams using the two detecting devices: the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) and the DZero (D0). It’s estimated that scientific papers will be produced thanks to those data for another two years at the same pace of the past, then the rate will fall but the publication might go on for another couple of years.

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Now there are plans to use the main Tevatron ring for other lower budget experiments and some components may be reused in other accelerators but future programs are all to be decided.

Luckily there’s the Large Hadron Collider to pursue the most extreme experiments in the field of particle physics, but I cann’t help wondering if discovering the ultimate secrets of the Universe can be price-tagged like a supermarket product.