It was Fermilab's Tevatron's demand for the rare and prohibitively expensive superconducting wires that triggered the widespread use of one of the most amazing breakthrough in medical science, the magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines, which has become a very popular tool for medical diagnosis.

Another monumental accomplishment of this US particle accelerator is the discovery of the existence of the top quark and five baryons which helped scientists test and refine the Standard Model of particle physics to shape man's understanding of matter, energy, space and time.

After almost 26 years dominance in high energy particle physics, this US laboratory has been powered down and has passed the baton to the bigger and better atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider. Run by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the LHC began operating in March 2010.

The retirement of Tevatron was largely due to the decision of the US Department of Energy not to spend the $35 million needed to extend its operation through 2014, although some scientists believed that the machine has outlived its useful life.

As a result, these US physicists will continue research at a remote operation center that Fermilab has set up to monitor experiments at CERN.

And while the Tevatron will no longer be conducting experiments, scientists are still hoping to make a major contribution to finding the Higgs boson - thought to be the agent which turned mass into solid matter soon after the Big Bang that created the universe 13.7 billion years ago.