The Race For The God Particle

A lot of attention has been paid to the Large Hadron Collider out in Switzerland, but here in the US a smaller atom smasher called Tevatron has been steadily working on the issue of finding the elusive Higgs boson, and the Illinois-based machine looks to be getting a new lease on life to find it.

The Tevatron accelerator could now remain operational until 2014, as physicists there now think the Higgs boson is within their reach.

The elusive Higgs boson is a sub-atomic particle considered crucial to the current theory of particle physics.

Scientists gave details of the discussions here at a major physics conference in Paris.

The International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP) runs from 22-28 July.

The Tevatron, based in Batavia, Illinois, is operated by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab).

The accelerator is the principal US rival to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is located on the French-Swiss border.

Both machines aim to be first in the hunt to find the Higgs.

Extending the lifetime of the US accelerator is a potential game-changer.

Some physicists say the LHC may not be in a position to detect the Higgs for 2-3 years.

The European machine will continue its current science run at around half its design energy until 2011. It will then be shut down for up to a year for maintenance work.

An extension to 2014 could give the Tevatron an advantage in the Higgs race.

And that would certainly put the US back on top of the particle physics world...if the Tevatron can find the staffing and the funding needed to keep going into 2014.  Something tells me however that getting either is going to be almost as hard as finding the Higgs boson.