Credit: Fermilab, P. Ginter

All anyone has heard about recently is the Large Hadron Collider, the giant, currently broken accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland. But the world’s most powerful, working accelerator is currently the Tevatron, at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.

Recently, the Tevatron has been saying they’ve got between a 50-50 and 96% chance of finding the elusive Higgs Boson, a key part of the mechanism by which other particles get their mass. We at the news team had a good head scratch about what “50-50 at worst, and up to 96% at best” means, but regardless it seems like reasonably good odds.

Budgets have been tight recently at Fermilab, and there was some question of whether the Tevatron would be able to continue running in the near future. The recent economic stimulus bill should help with that; it gives a $1.6 billion shot in the arm to the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. One can only assume that the extra dough will help keep Tevatron kicking.