June 22, 2007

Particle Collider in Europe, Long Awaited by Physicists, Is Delayed Until 2008

Particle physicists around the world will have to wait almost another year before they can start playing with their big new toy. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced today
that it would delay starting up the giant Large Hadron Collider from this November until May 2008. Construction of the collider, which will be the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, ran into a number of setbacks this year, including the failure of a superconducting magnet provided by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in the United States.

The setback means that Fermilab, as the American facility is known, will have more time to dominate the world of particle physics with its Tevatron collider, before the more powerful and sophisticated Large Hadron Collider supplants it. Researchers at the Tevatron are trying to collect as much data as possible, with the hope of detecting, for the first time, the Higgs boson — a particle that, according to theory, gives mass to matter in the universe.

This year, one team of researchers working at the Tevatron thought it had collected potential evidence of the Higgs, but hope fizzled after subsequent work suggested other interpretations. A new rumor says a separate experiment there might have the Higgs in sight, but researchers working on the data will not discuss their findings until they have finished their analyses. —Richard Monastersky

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