The Legacy of the Tevatron in the Area of Accelerator Science

Abstract

For more than 25 years the Tevatron was the highest energy accelerator in the world, providing the first access to particle collisions beyond 1 TeV and achieving an ultimate performance a factor of four hundred beyond the original design goals. This article reviews the many formidable challenges that were overcome, and the knowledge gained, in building, operating, and improving the Tevatron over its lifetime. These challenges included: the first operations of an accelerator based on superconducting magnets, production of antiprotons in sufficient numbers to support a useable luminosity, management of beam-beam, intrabeam, and other collective effects, novel manipulations of the beam longitudinal phase space, and development and application of a wide variety of innovative technologies. These achievements established the legacy of the Tevatron as the progenitor of all subsequently constructed high energy hadron colliders.