At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths | Hacker News Reader

At Particle Lab, a Tantalizing Glimpse Has Physicists Holding Their Breaths

nytimes.com

52 pointshardtke19 comments

This stood out to me:

"a spectacular last hurrah for Fermilab’s Tevatron, once the world’s most powerful particle accelerator and now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it."

I don't know the backstory here, so I won't jump to conclusions. Is there a reason besides lack of funds for shutting this place down?

> Is there a reason besides lack of funds for shutting this place down?

It's always a trade-off between money and physics results. The question is: is the cost of running the Tevatron worth the information it will give you about the few physics questions where it has an advantage over the LHC? Would that money be better spent on other experiments (e.g. direct dark matter detection)?

How do they decommission a lab like Fermi? Does private industry by the particle accelerator and use it for some other applications?

The lab itself will stay there. Only one experiment is being shut down (D0 at the tevatron. Granted when people think Fermilab, they think tevatron, but there are other experiments located there). They have future plans for a new accelerator located at the tevatron location.

I assume that most of the technology will have to be scrapped, and the only thing that would be reused would be the tunnels.

http://projectx.fnal.gov/index.shtml

The components of the accelerator have other uses but a lot of it will likely end up on the scrap heap.

It's just reached the end of it's operating life-time. I beleive the Tevatron exceeded it's original design plans re longevity, performance etc and like any piece of technology it's getting out-dated. It's just not worth running it any more: you're better off funding new. modern infrastructure that has a far broader/deeper research scope.

Fermilab itself is not closing down, just the Tevatron. The lab will continue to operate.

Newer, better particle accelerators such as the LHC is my guess.

I'd imagine it still can conduct valuable science though? Kind of like how keplar discoveries are confirmed by small ground based telescopes which are more able to dedicate their time to a single object for a time.

The LHC might be more powerful but couldn't it throw up things that need more detailed analysis that the LHC doesn't have time for with many groups clamoring for time on it? Of course this may not be as true of physics as astronomy, I only know the basics of physics.

The surprising thing about high-energy-frontier accelerators is that, for the most part, groups aren't competing for beam time like they are at many other types of particle physics experiments. Roughly, they just hit the "Go" button on the machine, and collect data continuously. This data is then distributed to thousands of grad students, who sift through it looking for a million possible signals.

There is a caveat that the LHC does some heavy-ion collisions (the ALICE experiment), which takes about a month away from normal proton-proton collisions, but this isn't a big deal. I'm not sure about the Tevatron, but I don't think they have any other experiments besides D0 and CDF which could justify the operating expense.

Not really. The bottle-neck for LHC isn't how many collisions it can throw up, or how fine its measurements can be, but rather processing the data. The data that LHC throws out goes all over the world (including Fermilab). LHC's engineering triumph is as much high-energy physics, as data processing/storage. Remember, most of the time the LHC isn't actually colliding, as opposed to telescopes.

> Remember, most of the time the LHC isn't actually colliding,

Huh? I'm pretty sure the LHC is designed to spend >50% of it's time colliding. Lately they've had to spend more downtime upgrading the machine because it's been finicky, but this if definitely hurting the project. The decisions about what risks to take and how much downtime to allow are hugely contested.

> The bottle-neck for LHC isn't how many collisions it can throw up...

The number of collisions is definitely a bottleneck. Yes, to some extent you can make up for a small data set by throwing more grad-students at the data to create a more clever analysis, but that really doesn't take you far. Searches for most major new physics scenarios have very well-defined minimum amounts of data. If the requisite amount of data isn'y taken in the LHC's 1-2 decade lifetime (because of delays/budget/whatever), and another accelerator isn't built, then we simply won't be able to evaluate that scenario.

> Remember, most of the time the LHC isn't actually colliding, as opposed to telescopes.

As an astronomer, I would hope that your telescopes also are not spending most of their time colliding. :)

(Although, if you're not careful, some older telescopes will let you run them into the ground.)

Ex particle-physicist here. Extremely unlikely to be a new force of nature, given the energies that the Tevatron operates at we'd have seen some evidence for this before - and nothing has ever suggested there might be something like this in addition to the fundamental 4. And whilst there might be wild speculation in the press as to what this might be, the research group(s) at Tevatron will certainly know. Given that one of the Tevatron's big hopes was to trump the LHC with a signature for the Higgs it could be something along these things, which would be fantastic. Although it's probably likely to be something more mundane.

Which is the paper mentioned in the article?

http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+Punzi/0/1/0/all/0/1

http://arxiv.org/find/all/1/all:+AND+punzi+lett/0/1/0/all/0/...

The New York Times has thankfully started to link to sources and papers and actually does so in this article. Here is the paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1104.0699

Links in the text are always a bit cryptic, it would help if they were to put an info box at the end of articles with all the relevant links — but I don't want to complain, putting the link in there at all is already a pretty masssive improvement.

Thanks. The link in the article was edited after my submission. When I posted the link was only to arxiv.org.

I hope the new force in nature is not this: "Fermilab’s Tevatron [...] now slated to go dark forever in September or earlier, whenever Fermilab runs out of money to operate it"

These Particle Accelerators should not be wasted or scrapped! This process could be used to study materials, which could lead to advances in: temperature limits, strength, etc...

Operating equipment like a particle accelerator is surely not cheap. If they decide that it would be better to share time on newer equipment rather than face the rising maintenance costs of older, less capable equipment, scrapping it is likely the best option.

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