Fermilab has a window of opportunity. Its 2-trillion-electron-volt proton–antiproton Tevatron collider is, at present, the world’s highest-energy particle accelerator—the only one with a shot at finding the elusive Higgs boson or direct indications of supersymmetry. But it will hold on to its monopoly only until the completion of CERN’s 14-TeV Large Hadron Collider, which is better poised to make such findings. The LHC is currently scheduled to turn on in 2007, although it is running into some problems (see Physics Today, Physics Today 0031-9228 55 5 2002 30 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.1485574 May 2002, page 30 ).
To take full advantage of its opportunity, in the 1990s Fermilab undertook a $260-million upgrade of the Tevatron, primarily to increase the collider’s luminosity—the event rate per unit interaction cross section. The Tevatron upgrade was designed to produce an initial fivefold increase in luminosity. The addition of an antiproton recycler more than a year from...
