Collisions galore
In May, Fermilab accelerator experts began to speculate about when the Tevatron collider would hit the inverse femtobarn mark, a measure of the gazillions of collisions produced since March 2001. Rumors about scientists betting on the exact date began to spread and, by the middle of June, the CDF and DZero experimenters knew that the "femtobarn era" was within reach. But with the Tevatron operating 24/7, would it happen on a weekend or perhaps in the middle of the night?
Circling the Tevatron ring at close to the speed of light, the protons and antiprotons of collider store 4233 pushed the collision total for both CDF and DZero experiments past the historic mark on Friday, June 24, at 3 p.m.
The timing couldn't have been better. Half an hour later, more than a thousand employees and experimenters from collaborating institutions began to gather for a champagne-and-brownies celebration in the atrium of Wilson Hall.
In 2001, the lab still measured the number of collisions in inverse nanobarns, or millionths of an inverse femtobarn. Since then it has boosted the performance of the Tevatron, and it plans to collect another seven inverse femtobarns by 2009.
Rumor has it that some scientists have already begun betting on the exact dates of the new set of milestones.
Kurt Riesselmann
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