Last lights for a legendary American atom smasher

When it comes to studying the universe, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, has been at the forefront of scientific research. That's now all for the history books.

Once the world's most powerful atom smashers, the facility's Tevatron shut down Friday Sept. 30, bringing its storied role in the history of physics to a close. The once-unrivaled atom smasher has since been eclipsed by the Large Hadron Collider buried beneath the border of France and Switzerland.

Nonetheless, it's been quite a run. As they attempted to recreate conditions that existed just after the Big Bang, Fermilab scientists registered myriad major finds, including the confirmation of the existence of the top quark - the last building block of matter to be discovered. It also was the proving ground for the baryon discovery that helped scientists refine their understanding of matter, energy, space and time.

Enrico Fermi, the great 20th century physicist and 1938 Nobel Prize winner whose name adorns the research facility.

March 1983: The Installation of the final magnet into the Energy Doubler.

July 3, 1983: The Main Control Room at the moment the Tevatron set a new world record by accelerating protons to 512 GeV, a unit of energy equal to billion electron volts.

In 1984, scientists reported success accelerating a Tevatron beam to 800 GeV. Here is an artist's rendition depicting the acceleration of particle beams in the Tevatron tunnel.

Antiproton Source produces and collects first antiprotons in 1985.

October 13, 1985: History in the making with the first observation of proton-antiproton collisions by the CDF collider detector at 1.6 TeV. Here, the names of the CDF crew when the first proton-antiproton collisions got detected.

In 1986, Tevatron was named one of the Top Ten Engineering Achievements of the last 100 years.

November 30, 1986: Tevatron registers the first proton-antiproton collisions at 1.8 TeV.

October 21, 1986: Acceleration of a Tevatron beam to 900 GeV., or gigaelectronvolts.

August 1991: The first 8MM tape was used to record data from a particle physics experiment.

A display of a particle collision event from the Tevatron's Run I. This particle collision event, created in 1997, shows a pair of top quarks reconstructed in the DZero experiment at Fermilab. This end view shows the final decay products: two muons (turquoise), a neutrino (pink), and four jets of particles.

February 2, 1995: The Tevatron sets a world record for the number of high-energy proton antiproton particle collisions.

March 3 1995: Discovery of the top quark. This was the final, undiscovered quark of the six that had been predicted by scientific theory.

November 18, 1996: Antihydrogen atoms get observed for the first time

March 1, 1999: Scientists at Fermilab discover a new matter-antimatter symmetry. In this image, Cesium iodide crystal being stacked for the experiment. One of the tenets of modern physics is that every particle of matter has a corresponding antiparticle of antimatter. At one time early in the evolution of our universe, matter and antimatter were equally abundant. No longer as the universe appears to be made entirely of matter. Scientists were only able to research antimatter in cosmic ray interactions and at particle accelerators such as Fermilab's Tevatron.

July 20, 2000: The DONut experiment reports the evidence for the direct observation of the tau neutrino. In this image, DONUT spokesman Vittorio Paolone, University of Pittsburgh, poses inside the magnet used to eliminate charged particles from the neutrino beam. The tau neutrino is the third kind of neutrino known to particle physicists.

September 9, 2006: An aerial shot of the Tevatron's accelerator rings. Tevatron achieves a peak luminosity of 2x 1032 cm-2 sec-1.

March 17, 2008: The collider produced more particle collisions per second than ever before - with a peak luminosity in excess of 3 x 1032 cm-2 sec-1.

March 3, 2009: Scientists come up with stricter limits on the likely mass of the Higgs boson. By early next year, Fermilab hopes to be able to conclude from Tevatron data that either the Higgs boson does not exist or that it's still a plausible theory. Even if there's evidence of the Higgs boson, it would have to be confirmed, and that would probably happen in Switzerland.

Aug. 4, 2009: Scientists at the Tevatron register an important advance in their quest for the elusive Higgs boson. For the first time, researchers were able to restrict the possible masses where the Higgs might lie

March 3, 2009: Particle collision experiments at Fermilab result in the discovery of a rare single top quark. Previously, top quarks had only been observed when produced by nuclear force. The finding was even more extraordinary given how rare it was: only one in every 20 billion proton-antiproton collisions produces a single top quark.

June 20, 2011: The discovery of the Xib, a heavy relative of the neutron.

View of the Cloud Experiment, Building 157

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