Physicists disappointed in hopes to pursue search for elusive particle

Alexander G. Higgins

Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2000 | 8:30 a.m.

GENEVA - Europe's top particle physics laboratory decided Wednesday to shut down the machine it was using to chase an elusive subatomic particle, believed to be key to understanding the makeup of the universe.

The long-delayed and much agonized-over decision could end hopes of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics to discover the particle before rival Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago.

Finding the particle, believed responsible for all the mass in the universe, is expected to be worthy of the Nobel prize for physics.

"Fermilab is clearly the next person up to bat," said Chris Tully, a Princeton University professor who had argued unsuccessfully for another year of searching in Geneva.

The particle is known as the Higgs boson. It has proven invisible in the more than 30 years that scientists have been looking for it. It exists for only a tiny fraction of a second, so physicists have been trying to see it while it is disintegrating.

The particle is named for British physicist Peter Higgs, whose theory holds that that the bosons create a field from which subatomic particles - such as quarks and electrons - pick up mass as they pass through.

On Thursday, the laboratory - known by its French acronym CERN - shut off the Large Electron-Proton collider in preparation for dismantling the 11-year-old machine, which is in a 17-mile circular tunnel under the Swiss-French border.

But CERN physicists asked the board to turn the LEP back on, saying they are tantalizingly close to finding the Higgs boson.

Wednesday, however, the laboratory decided that the findings were "not sufficiently conclusive" to keep open the massive particle accelerator, which is to be dismantled as part of a planned $1.8 billion, five-year upgrade.

A delay was believed likely to cost millions of dollars in deferred contracts to build a much more powerful collider - eagerly awaited by researchers around the world already planning experiments for the new equipment.

"It's tragic that the scientific arguments, which were strong and recommended to run LEP (the collider) next year, took a back seat to financial and scheduling arguments," Tully said.

Sau Lan Wu, a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has devoted much of the past 20 years to the search for Higgs, said she was "terribly disappointed" by the decision but hoped the pioneering work by CERN would receive joint credit with any success by Fermilab.

CERN's research board agonized Tuesday over whether possible glimpses of the Higgs boson were compelling enough to defer the construction project. Two of the four LEP detectors recorded what appeared to be signals of the particle, the scientists said.

But director-general Luciano Maiani announced Wednesday that the LEP accelerator had "been switched off for the last time."

CERN's management decided that the best policy is to proceed "full speed ahead" with the upgrade. Maiani will ask its 20-nation governing body next month to confirm that the LEP will be dismantled and will seek more money to speed up construction of the new collider.

Fermilab has been upgrading its own facilities for four years. It will start its Higgs boson experiments in the spring.

---

On the Net:

CERN: http://www.cern.ch

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory: http://www.fnal.gov