"It's taken years of hard work and close collaboration among universities, national laboratories and private companies to get to this point, " said Pier Oddone, director of the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.

ENGADGET: NOvA neutrino detector captures cosmic rays in 3D, aims to unlock the mysteries of the universe

For a quarter of a century before CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began working in earnest in 2009 the Tevatron, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, near Chicago, dominated high-energy physics.

ECONOMIST: The future of physics (1): So long, and thanks for all the quarks | The

Beyond its obvious visual appeal, data like this should give physicists at the DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory insight into the nature of neutrinos (some of which are said to have been issued from the Big Bang) and, by extension, the origins of our ever-expanding universe.

ENGADGET

This, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the high-tech corridor to the west of Chicago, and Northwestern University in nearby Evanston, together attract scientists from all over the world and, it is hoped, will help make the city a centre for nano- and other kinds of technology.

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