Here begins my Collider Blog.

The Tevatron at Fermilab is currently the world’s highest energy accelerator. Very high energy protons and anti-protons collide at the centers of the CDF and D0 detectors, which record the traces left by the particles produced from the energy of those collisions. Sometimes rare processes occur which lead to interesting events; by identifying and studying these events we learn about those processes and, ultimately, about basic particle physics.

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at CERN will supercede the Tevatron in a couple of years. It will have an energy that is seven times higher than that of the Tevatron, which allows rare processes to be studied more easily. There are two detectors here, too, called CMS and ATLAS.

Accelerator-based particle physics clearly is at a cross road, and much has been written about the promise of the LHC just as impressive results are produced with the Tevatron data. The start-up of the LHC is bound to be frustrating as well as exciting, yet I personally believe that much is still to come from the Tevatron program. It seems like a good time to observe the field, especially the science that emerges over the next few years, and perhaps make some notes and comment on what is happening.

My goal is to discuss the some of the research done at these two hadron colliders in a serious way. As an experimenter I will try to bring out what I think is interesting, exciting or beautiful about analyses from CDF, D0, CMS and ATLAS (I am a member of CDF and CMS, by the way), and hopefully complement some of the excellent theory-oriented blogs, and blogs by experimenters working at other facilities.