Tevatron was a device that accelerated particles of matter to high energies. The Tevatron was housed at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, commonly called Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois. The machine could accelerate protons to an energy of almost 1 trillion electronvolts. One electronvolt is the energy needed to move an electron between two points with a potential difference of 1 volt. The Tevatron’s name came from TeV, a commonly used abbreviation for trillion electronvolts. The Tevatron was also able to accelerate antiprotons, the antimatter equivalents of protons. Unlike protons, antiprotons are rare in nature and typically short-lived. Special equipment enabled scientists and engineers to produce and gather antiprotons for use in the Tevatron.
The Tevatron accelerated particles by guiding them along a circular path with a circumference of 3.9 miles (6.3 kilometers). The protons traveled in one direction around the ring, and the antiprotons traveled in the other direction. Powerful magnets kept the particles in their paths as they moved around the accelerator. After accelerating the protons and antiprotons to 980 billion electronvolts (980 GeV), the Tevatron guided them into head-on collisions in the centers of two gigantic particle detectors. The total energy of each collision measured 1.96 TeV. The detectors registered and recorded the particles that the collisions gave off.
In 1995, scientists using the Tevatron announced the discovery of the top quark, the heaviest known elementary particle. Elementary particles are tiny pieces of matter not made up of any smaller pieces. All protons consist of smaller pieces called quarks, but these quarks are relatively light. In contrast, the top quark weighs about 175 times as much as an entire proton and does not occur in nature. Some of the energy of the collision was converted into the mass of the top quark.
The particle accelerator that later became known as the Tevatron began operating in 1972. At that time, the machine could accelerate protons to energies of about 400 GeV. In 1983, scientists and engineers upgraded the accelerator to enable it to reach energies of 800 GeV and, eventually, 980 GeV. In 1985, the Tevatron scientists and engineers installed equipment used to create and gather antiprotons. In 2009, the Tevatron was surpassed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), built on the Swiss-French border by CERN, as the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. CERN is a center for nuclear research run by the European Union. The U.S. Department of Energy shut down the Tevatron in 2011.
See also Particle accelerator (The synchrotron); Synchrotron.
