Update: Fermilab will stay open

New budget resolution makes month-long furlough unnecessary

BATAVIA — Thanks to a newly passed budget resolution, it looks like Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory will not have to shut down for a month after all.

Dr. Pier Oddone, director of Fermilab, announced to employees this week that a month-long furlough, mentioned last month as a possibility because of federal budget issues, will not be required. The U.S. Department of Energy, which owns Fermilab, informed them of the good news on Thursday.

“Everyone was very relieved,” said spokesman Judy Jackson, noting that it wasn’t just the lab employees waiting for word on the budget, but also researchers hoping to use the Tevatron, the lab’s massive particle collider, for their experiments.

The continuing resolution, which funds government programs through the end of September, was signed into law by President George W. Bush on Thursday.

The Department of Energy requested $4.1 billion for its science division, to continue funding research into alternative energy sources and particle physics. The budget resolution grants Fermilab funds equal to their 2006 levels, plus an as-yet-undetermined increase, which Jackson said the DOE is certain will keep the doors open for the full fiscal year.

It’s especially good news, Jackson said, because the window of opportunity for scientists to make important particle physics discoveries using the Tevatron may be closing. The Large Hadron Collider, a tool that would dwarf the Tevatron and render it obsolete, is set to come online at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland sometime this year.

“The last thing we want to do is close down this valuable tool of discovery,” Jackson said. “We need to make use of every minute, and we’re delighted that we don’t have to shortchange that.”

The Tevatron has been working overtime, Jackson said, in search of a particle called Higgs’ Boson, considered one of the greatest mysteries in particle physics. She called the past few months the “Tevatron’s finest hour,” and said that the experiments conducted with it continue to break records, bringing scientists closer to the elusive boson.

Fermilab officials are still hoping that the lab will be chosen as the site for the International Linear Collider, a proposed 20-mile-long particle accelerator currently being designed by a team of physicists from around the world. If Fermilab doesn’t get the ILC, it would face obsolescence in the field of particle physics.

But for now, Jackson said that lab officials are just thankful that they won’t have to put their research on the back burner, and can continue full steam ahead.

“We’re grateful to all the people in Illinois and the country who pulled together to make sure that forefront science in this country did not have to go on hold,” she said. “They understood the harm that could have been done.”