Fermilab's superconducting synchrotron strives for 1 TeV

The first high-energy superconducting synchrotron in the world, the Tevatron, at Fermilab, accelerated protons to 512 GeV last July. By the time of the 12th International Conference on High-Energy Accelerators held at Fermilab in August, the Tevatron had reached 700 GeV. Since October it has been used for fixed-target experiments at 400 GeV. This month Fermilab plans to raise the energy to 750 GeV or so and then run experiments at that energy until July. During the summer, the lab plans to repair marginal magnets and director Leon Lederman hopes the Tevatron will by November indeed be worthy of its name, accelerating protons close to 1000 GeV or 1 TeV. Meanwhile, an antiproton source is being constructed; in 1986 the lab expects to have a pp̄ collider ready for experiments with as much as 1 TeV in each beam.