This has been a fantastic year for high-energy physics. The long wait for the Higgs boson appears, finally, to be over, and with CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) churning out unprecedented numbers of data, more discoveries seem just around the corner. But for some members of the community, these successes are bittersweet. The closure of the Tevatron collider – once an American rival to Europe’s LHC – in September 2011 signalled the end of an era for particle physics in the US, and forced many researchers at Fermilab, the Tevatron’s home, to rethink their career plans. Should they change fields? Move to CERN and the LHC? Or just get used to flying across the Atlantic a lot?
I travelled to Fermilab and CERN to learn more about the changing geography of high-energy physics and how it affects individual researchers. In this behind-the-scenes podcast, you’ll hear senior scientists and early-career researchers talking candidly about their working lives, their reactions to the Tevatron’s shutdown and their plans for the future.
