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After decades as the workhorse of particle physics in America, the venerable Tevatron shuts down today. While the high costs of maintaining the structure are cited as the primary reason for the closure, the rising star of the Large Hadron Collider no doubt played some role in the Tevatron's demise. The 3.9 mile long particle smasher was completed in 1983 for the breathtaking cost of $120 million. Built in rural Illinois as part of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), the Tevatron was at one point the highest-energy particle collider in the world. During its decades of operation, the Tevatron has confirmed the existence of the Top Quark, discovered a new particle called the "bottom Omega baryon," and even partook in the chase for the elusive Higgs boson. Though the main structure of the accelerator may be used in future experiments, and there are reams of data yet to go over, the Tevatron ended its scientific life today at 2 P.M.. Farewell, Tevatron. We'll spill some for you tonight. (via Wired)

Scientists have been buzzing about the potential discovery of a new particle at Chicago's Fermilab Tevatron Collider since April when data that could have been evidence for a new particle was announced by the CDF group. On first estimate, CDF concluded that there was a one in ten thousand chance of the evidence being a statistical fluke, but as the strength of the signal grew upon further analysis, those odds were revised to be one in a million. It turns out that the "new particle" data is actually one in a million. Following analysis of the evidence by Fermilab's second detector DZero, the researchers have concluded that there is no new particle. The DZero analysis, combined with the lack of any indication that a particle of the right mass has been detected by CERN's Large Hardon Collider, suggests that the initial evidence may be unique to the CDF detector rather than an actual new particle.

Researchers at Illinois' Fermilab Tevatron are cautiously optimistic that a bump in their data may herald the discovery either a new force, such as gravity or magnetism, or a new elementary particle. And no, it doesn't seem to be the Higgs boson. A new analysis of 10,000 collisions between proton and anti-protons created jets of heavier particles, which was to be expected. What was surprising was that 250 more times than expected, those particles were much heavier than they should have been, clocking in around 144 billion electron volts. This suggests that a new particle was created and decayed before it hit the detector, or a new force acted on the particles.

Discovery News totally called this one: It turns out that all of those rumors that the elusive Higgs Boson had been discovered by Fermilab's Tevatron accelerator aren't true.

Last week, a physicist and blogger at the University of Padua, Tommaso Dorigo, wrote that "It reached my ear, from two different, possibly independent sources, that an experiment at the Tevatron is about to release some evidence of a light Higgs boson signal. Some say a three-sigma effect, others do not make explicit claims but talk of a unexpected result." Like a uranium-235 chain reaction, Dorigo's words exploded through the blogosphere and into the mainstream media, which inexplicably turned the rumored discovery into the latest in a nonexistent 'rivalry' between Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider.

Fermilab has laid the smackdown on the Higgs Boson discovery rumors, saying that they have "no merit" and are "just rumors." Fermilab has also taken a few digs at bloggers in the process: