The big turn-on

The world’s highest-energy particle collider is working again after four
years of refurbishment. The Tevatron at Fermilab near Chicago began smashing
protons into antiprotons on 1 March, and physicists are sifting through the
debris in search of new particles. If recent reports from CERN in Geneva and
Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York are correct, Fermilab researchers
could be poised to discover the long-sought Higgs boson and new particles
predicted by supersymmetry theories. “We’re feeling a great deal of pressure
because we want to do the best job possible,” says Ray Culbertson, who works on
the Tevatron’s CDF detector.