Everything about Tevatron totally explained
Tevatron is a circular
particle accelerator at the
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in
Batavia, Illinois and is currently the highest energy particle collider in the world. The Tevatron is a
synchrotron that accelerates
protons and
antiprotons in a 6.3
km ring to energies of up to 1
TeV, hence the name. The Tevatron was completed in 1983 at a cost of $120 million and has been regularly upgraded since then. The
Main Injector was the most substantial addition, built over five years from 1994 at a cost of $290 million.
The acceleration occurs in a number of stages. The first stage is the 750
keV Cockcroft-Walton pre-accelerator, which
ionizes
hydrogen gas and accelerates the negative ions created using a positive
voltage. The ions then pass into the 150
meter long
linear accelerator (linac) which uses oscillating electrical fields to accelerate the ions to 400
MeV. The ions then pass through a carbon foil, to remove the
electrons, and the charged
protons then move into the
Booster.
The Booster is a small circular magnetic accelerator, around which the protons pass up to 20,000 times to attain an energy of around 8
GeV. From the Booster the particles pass into the Main Injector, which was completed in 1999 to perform a number of tasks. It can accelerate protons up to 150 GeV; it can produce 120 GeV protons for antiproton creation; it can increase antiproton energy to 120 GeV and it can inject protons or antiprotons into the Tevatron. The antiprotons are created by the
Antiproton Source. 120 GeV protons are collided with a nickel target producing a range of particles including antiprotons which can be collected and stored in the accumulator ring. The ring can then pass the antiprotons to the Main Injector.
The Tevatron can accelerate the particles from the Main Injector up to 980 GeV, within 320 km/h or %99.999956 of the speed of light. The protons and antiprotons are accelerated in opposite directions, crossing paths in the
CDF and
D0 detectors to collide at 1.96 TeV. To hold the particles on track the Tevatron uses
superconducting dipole
magnets cooled in liquid
helium producing 4.2
teslas.
On
September 27 1993 the
cryogenic cooling system of the Tevatron Accelerator was named an International Historic Landmark by the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The system, which provides cryogenic liquid helium to the Tevatron's superconducting magnets, was the largest low-temperature system in existence upon its completion in 1978. It keeps the coils of the magnets, which bend and focus the particle beam, in a superconducting state so that they consume only 1/3 of the power they'd require at normal temperatures.
In 1995, the
CDF and
D0 collaborations announced the discovery of the
top quark, and by 2007 they measured its mass to a precision of nearly 1%. In 2006, they made the first measurement and observation of
Bs oscillations.
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