The hunt for the Higgs boson, God particle or Goddamn particle, the one that gives things mass, came closer to an end.

Physicists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in Europe, the world’s largest particle accelerator, found evidence of the particle and its energy field. But the LHC didn’t do it alone.

The search has been a massive, costly and unprecedented international effort that began thousands of miles away, at another atom smasher beneath the Illinois prairie. The main achievement the Tevatron was discovery, in 1995, of the top quark — the last fundamental fermion predicted by the standard model of the particle physics.

The Tevatron ceased operations on 30 September, 2011, due to budget cuts and because of the completion of the LHC, which began operations in early 2010 and was far more powerful. The main ring of the Tevatron will probably be reused in future experiments, and its components may be transferred to other particle accelerators.