And then there was one. The ageing Tevatron collider will bow out of the race to find the elusive Higgs particle, thought to endow 

The Tevatron’s 6.3-kilometer-long ring will stop colliding particles this year, rather than in 2014.(picture from laboratoryequipment website)

other particles with mass, later this year, leaving the task to its rival, the Large Hadron Collider.

The Tevatron, based at Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois, was set to shut down in September 2011. But last year, a panel that advises the US government on physics matters recommended extending (pdf) the Tevatron's operations by three years, to 2014, if additional funds could be added to the budget for high-energy physics.

Now, the US Department of Energy, which funds Fermilab, says no such funding is forthcoming. "Unfortunately, the current budgetary climate is very challenging," writes William F Brinkman, director of the DOE's Office of Science in a letter (pdf) to the advisory panel.

The Tevatron and the LHC, based in Switzerland, each boast different strengths in their ability to search for the Higgs – the 27-year-old Tevatron has analysed many more particle collisions than the newer LHC, but the LHC can reach higher energies.

But Brinkman says the LHC should be able to handle the hunt on its own. "Given the LHC performance to date, it appears likely that experiments at the LHC either will rule out or discover a standard model Higgs boson by late 2012, addressing this pressing topic in particle physics in a timely manner," writes Brinkman.

Without an infusion of extra money from the DOE, a stay of execution for the Tevatron would have delayed other particle physics projects at Fermilab, including experiments aimed at pinning down the properties of neutrinos. Fermilab's director, Pier Oddone, opposed this siphoning of funds in a commentary posted online last year. "I do not support squeezing the funds for an extension of the run out of the rest of the high-energy physics community," he wrote.

In a note posted to the Fermilab community on Monday, Oddone wrote: "While we would have liked to run the Tevatron for three more years, our life going forward is full of promising projects and great opportunities for major discoveries."

Source: Newscientist.com 

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2011/01/tevatron-collider-to-shut-down.html