Tevatron

The Tevatron was a circular particle accelerator in the United States, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory , east of Batavia, Illinois, and is the second highest energy particle collider ever built, after the Large Hadron Collider of the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, Switzerland. The Tevatron was a synchrotron that accelerated protons and antiprotons in a 6.28 km ring to energies of up to 1 TeV, hence its name. The Tevatron was completed in 1983 at a cost of $120 million and significant upgrade investments were made in 1983–2011.

The main achievement of the Tevatron was the discovery in 1995 of the top quark—the last fundamental fermion predicted by the standard model of particle physics. On July 2, 2012, scientists of the CDF and DØ collider experiment teams at Fermilab announced the findings from the analysis of around 500 trillion collisions produced from the Tevatron collider since 2001, and found that the existence of the suspected Higgs boson was highly likely with only a 1-in-550 chance that the signs were due to a statistical fluctuation. The findings were confirmed two days later as being correct with a likelihood of error less than 1 in a million by data from the LHC experiments.

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