Americans, but in general scientists, and science-lovers of any country, should be proud of the achievements of the Tevatron collider, the 2-TeV proton-antiproton collider build over a quarter of a century ago under the prairie of Batavia (IL), and which is still the world's most powerful, and may I say successful, particle accelerator ever built by humans.
Ok, I know I will now enrage the supporters of electron-positron machines, in particular the one which discovered the charm quark and the tau lepton, or the ones which uncovered many mysteries of electroweak interactions in the nineties. But the achievements which the Tevatron has allowed, and the advancement of Science produced in the realms of QCD, electroweak theory, searches for new physics, B physics, are really outstanding, so much so that I cannot bring myself to making a list here. Suffices to say that some of the measurements produced by CDF and D0 with the Tevatron data will remain the best in the world for many years, maybe even a decade, into the running of the Large Hadron Collider, the CERN competitor which will start recording collisions in a couple of months.
Check out the graph above (courtesy G.Ch.), which shows the integrated luminosity delivered by the Tevatron since the start of Run II seven years ago: we just surpassed the seven inverse femtobarns mark! That corresponds to about five hundred trillion collisions delivered in the core of the CDF and D0 detectors, for a grand total of a quadrillion events! Kudos to the Tevatron scientists for this terrific goal!
