A Fermilab advisory committee has released a report recommending that the Tevatron’s operations be extended until 2014, at a cost of around $150 million. The Tevatron is a proton-anti-proton collider that produced the discovery of the top quark and that has placed constraints on the mass of the Higgs, the elusive particle hypothesized to endow others with mass.

Keith Baker of Yale University, a member of the committee, says the primary reason for recommending an extension was the likelihood that an extended Tevatron run would find a signal of the Higgs at the statistical level of 3 standard deviations – the level needed to claim evidence, although not proof, in the particle physics community. The extension would more than double the luminosity of the colliding beams, greatly increasing the number of particle collisions that are produced. Even if no Higgs is seen, the resulting data would be enough to bring the Higgs no-show into direct conflict with observed masses for known particles such as the top quark– something that particle physicists find as tantalizing as the possibility of an actual detection. “That is an indication of new physics,” says Baker.

Any extension will be bound to fuel talk of a race to spot the Higgs between the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland. The LHC has suffered from several accidents and delays while the Tevatron is described as being at its best performance yet. But Rick Van Kooten of Indiana University, the Chairman of the committee, says discussion focused on the difference in the detections that would result from both facilities. The LHC collides protons and should first see evidence for the Higgs when the particle decays to photons, while the Tevatron will see evidence of a decay to bottom quark and antiquarks. “We want to stress the complimentarity,” Van Kooten says.

A final decision on the Tevatron extension is expected before the end of the year, and rests with the Director of Fermilab, Pier Oddone, and Denis Kovar, the Associate Director of Science for High Energy Physics at the Department of Energy. They are likely to receive input from other physics advisory panels, including the High Energy Physical Advisory Panel (HEPAP), as well as taking on board the willingness — or otherwise — of the US Congress to support an extension. In a column posted online this morning, Oddone injected a hefty dose of realism. “I do not support squeezing the funds for an extension of the run out of the rest of the high-energy physics community,” he says, suggesting that without extra money he might not feel able to follow the recommendation.

Image: Fermilab / Reidar Hahn