A particle physics drought looms in Germany, from the time the plug is pulled on the Hadron Electron Ring Accelerator Facility (HERA) at the end of 2006 until whenever activity on the world’s next linear collider revs up. “We face the danger of shutting down a unique accelerator irrevocably, and then sitting here for a very long time without particle physics,” says Christian Kiesling of the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich and a member of the team that is pushing to extend HERA’s lifetime. For the extension to happen, proponents will have to scrape together money and manpower and win over the management of the accelerator’s parent lab, the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg.
Nicknamed the “super electron microscope” because, by colliding high-energy electrons (or positrons) with protons, it provides a glimpse of the proton interior, the 11-year-old HERA has undergone an upgrade to higher luminosity and...
