Top U.S. Particle Accelerator Set for Shutdown This Year

The Obama administration has decided to shut down the Tevatron, the four-mile-long particle accelerator at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago, rather than financing a proposed three-year extension. Fermilab is a research base for some 1,500 university scientists, and the planned closure this fall of what had been the world’s most powerful particle accelerator was dreaded by some of them and welcomed by others, who feared that prolonging the Tevatron might divert scarce money that could instead be used for a new generation of scientific experiments.