The US Department of Energy has decided not to fund a three-year extension of the Tevatron, the particle collider at Fermilab near Chicago. The decision dashes hopes for a US-based discovery of the long-predicted Higgs particle, which is thought to endow other particles with mass. The stage is now set for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, near Generva, to make the historic find.

Further details are available in a letter

from Bill Brinkman, the Director of the Office of Science, to Melvyn Shochet, the chairman of the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel (HEPAP). HEPAP had recommended an extension, provided additional funds could be found. But in the letter, Brinkman explains that extra money is not available. “Unfortunately, the current budgetary climate is very challenging and additional funding has not been identified.” The upshot is that Tevatron will shut down this year after its current run is concluded.

Robert Roser of the Collider Detector at Fermilab, one of the Tevatron experiments , says particle physicists are living in a difficult economic climate. At Fermilab he says attention will now shift to doing the best to wrap up the current Tevatron run successfully and place the best constraints on the Higgs that are possible with existing data. “We raised the bar for the LHC and we’re very proud of our accomplishments,” he says.

In a memo to the Fermilab community today, director Pier Oddone writes: “The Tevatron has exceeded all expectations. The life of this legendary machine has been marked by historic discoveries made possible by its innovative accelerator and detector technologies. The experience developed during its operation has also immensely helped the development of the LHC accelerator and detectors.”

Image: Reider Hahn/ Fermilab