Tevatron atom smasher goes silent after 28 years

The 4-mile-long ring-shaped accelerator, located at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, was built to hurl tiny bits of matter at each other with an aim that it would help understand and identify the origin of mass, extra dimensions of space and new particles.

While it was once the most powerful atom smasher, the Tevatron has recently been surpassed by the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, LiveScience reported.

The Tevatron particle accelerator powered down on Friday becuase of budget constraints, the report said.

"It was a very interesting machine to work on in the first place, because we knew we were building something that had never been built before," said Roger Dixon, who has worked at Fermilab for more than three decades.

Stating that people who worked closely with the Tevatron felt the machine had a real presence, he said: "It definitely has a personality, and that started right away. It had an attitude at the beginning."

The Tevatron was most recently in the news in April when a report suggested the accelerator's Collider Detector at Fermilab experiment may have detected a never-seen-before subatomic particle.

However, that tantalising signal was found with an independent test to be a fluke. Even so, the Tevatron is not without its share of big fundamental discoveries.
The particle accelerator played a part in some major physics finds, such as reporting the existence of the top quark and five baryons.

The baryon discovery helped scientists test and refine the Standard Model of particle physics and shape our understanding of matter, energy, space and time.
The experiments at Tevatron have also helped narrow down the search for the elusive Higgs Boson, or "god particle".

The silent Tevatron will eventually be opened up for public.