The Tevatron was a circular particle accelerator (active until 2011) in the United States, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (called Fermilab), east of Batavia, Illinois, and was the highest energy particle collider until the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was built near Geneva, Switzerland.

The Tevatron was a synchrotron that accelerated protons and antiprotons in a 6.28 km (3.90 mi) circumference ring to energies of up to 1 TeV, hence its name.

The main achievement of the Tevatron was the discovery in 1995 of the top quark—the last fundamental fermion predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.

The construction of the Main Accelerator Enclosure began on October 3, 1969, when the first shovel of earth was turned by Robert R. Wilson, NAL's director.

[12] On July 16, 2004, the Tevatron achieved a new peak luminosity, breaking the record previously held by the old European Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) at CERN.

The first stage was the 750 keV Cockcroft–Walton pre-accelerator, which ionized hydrogen gas and accelerated the negative ions created using a positive voltage.

120 GeV protons were collided with a nickel target producing a range of particles including antiprotons which could be collected and stored in the accumulator ring.

The protons and antiprotons were accelerated in opposite directions, crossing paths in the CDF and DØ detectors to collide at 1.96 TeV.

To hold the particles on track the Tevatron used 774 niobium–titanium superconducting dipole magnets cooled in liquid helium producing the field strength of 4.2 tesla.

[15] On September 27, 1993, the cryogenic cooling system of the Tevatron Accelerator was named an International Historic Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

It kept the coils of the magnets, which bent and focused the particle beam, in a superconducting state, so that they consumed only ⅓ of the power they would have required at normal temperatures.

[17] In September 2008, the DØ collaboration reported detection of the Ω−b, a "double strange" Omega baryon with the measured mass significantly higher than the quark model prediction.

[18][19] In May 2009 the CDF collaboration made public their results on search for Ω−b based on analysis of data sample roughly four times larger than the one used by DØ experiment.

[21][22] The statistical significance of the observed signs was 2.9 sigma, which meant that there is only a 1-in-550 chance that a signal of that magnitude would have occurred if no particle in fact existed with those properties.

Even from thousands of miles away, earthquakes caused strong enough movements in the magnets to negatively affect the quality of particle beams and even disrupt them.