From her office window at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, Young-Kee Kim can see a glorious history. The clusters of buildings connected by a circular roadway mark the location of the Tevatron – the giant underground collider ring that remains, for a few months more, the world’s largest particle accelerator.
Come November that baton will pass to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. The handoff will make official what is already widely acknowledged: the dynamic heart of particle physics no longer beats in the US.
For Kim, deputy director of Fermilab, the transition ushers in a delicate new…
