The final shutdown of the Large Electron–Positron Collider at CERN three years ago left Fermilab’s Tevatron collider as the world’s only accelerator at the so-called energy frontier of particle physics. And the Tevatron will retain that unique status for another five years or so, until the baton passes to the Large Hadron Collider, now under construction in the vacated LEP tunnel.
The 6-km-circumference Tevatron ring brings countercirculating beams of 1-TeV protons and antiprotons into collision. By 2008, the LHC should be providing experimenters with proton-proton collisions at seven times that energy. For that reason, and because the Tevatron is now the only high-energy game in town, the US particle-physics community and its funders are particularly anxious that the Fermilab collider turn out as much data as possible before the LHC starts producing physics results.
If that’s the goal, the Tevatron’s performance over the past few years has been—by consensus—disappointing. In...
