Oliver Morton

The Final Tally Leaves LEP a Probable Loser

Physicists at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, are making a last-ditch appeal to postpone demolition of the labs Large Electron-Positron (LEP) collider. Scheduled to be scrapped in September to make room for a new device, the Large Hadron Collider, LEP was granted a 1-month stay of execution so physicists could continue experiments hinting at evidence for the Higgs boson--a theoretical particle that physicists have coveted for decades. On 8 November, CERNs director-general turned down a further extension, but the executive committee of the labs staff association blasted the decision, saying that the case against LEP had not been made clearly enough.