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THEN there was one. The ageing Tevatron collider is to bow out of the race to find the Higgs particle later this year. This leaves the task of discovering the particle thought to endow all others with mass to its rival, the Large Hadron Collider.
The Tevatron, based at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, was set to shut down in September 2011. But last year, a panel that advises the US government on physics matters the collider’s operations to 2014, if additional funds could be found.
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Now the US Department of Energy says no such funding will be forthcoming. “The current budgetary climate is very challenging,” writes William Brinkman, director of the DOE’s Office of Science, in a to the panel.
Brinkman says the LHC, at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, should be able to handle the Higgs hunt on its own: “It appears likely that experiments at the LHC will either rule out or discover a standard model Higgs boson by late 2012.”