With the Large Hadron Collider still in the repair shop,
the race to find the Higgs boson particle has become a lot tighter,
thanks to the older and less powerful - but nonetheless working -
Tevatron collider near Chicago.
"The Tevatron definitely has a chance," says Greg Landsberg of
Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who works on one of
the LHC's detectors.
With the LHC due to restart only in November at CERN near
Geneva, Switzerland, the Tevatron has been gaining ground in the
search for the Higgs, the particle thought to give mass to other
elementary particles. At last week's Lepton Photon conference in
Hamburg, Germany, Tevatron physicists said that by early 2011 they
will have recorded enough data to allow them to either find or rule
out the Higgs as predicted by the standard model.
Tevatron physicists said that by early 2011 they will have the data
to either find the Higgs or rule it out
The LHC will have to sprint to catch up, and it won't be easy.
While the LHC's higher energies should produce more Higgs
particles, it will also boost the production of other particles
that can mimic a Higgs, says Gordon Kane of the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor. Telling between the two will require a
precise understanding of how the LHC's detectors are working, which
takes time to develop.
The LHC, however, could become the first to find particles of
dark matter, a search for which the Tevatron is not well
suited.