The planned shutdown the Fermilab Tevatron ends hopes it might win the race to find the most sought-after particle in high-energy physics, U.S. scientists say.

The U.S. Department of Energy informed the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory it was unable to come up with a $35 million a year to keep the Tevatron running until 2014, ScienceNews.com reported Thursday.

The energy department's advisory panel on high energy physics had recommended the Tevatron be operated for an additional three years after the European physics consortium CERN announced its more powerful Large Hadron Collider would close down for all of 2012 for repairs, but the department said the Tevatron in Batavia, Ill., would cease operating in September of this year.

CERN's yearlong shutdown had seemed to offer an opportunity for the Tevatron to close in on the Higgs boson, a particle whose existence would explain the origin of mass in subatomic particles.

"The Tevatron has now accumulated enough data to be sensitive to the mass of the Higgs [as predicted] in the standard model" of elementary particle physics, says Stefan Soldner-Rembold, a physicist based at the University of Manchester in England, who is a spokesperson for one of the Tevatron's two main experiments. "We have reached a threshold and it seems like a waste to turn [the Tevatron] off at such a moment when one is almost there."

One researcher says taking the Tevatron's retirement philosophically.

"All great accelerators have an end," Rocky Kolb of the University of Chicago says. "Any disappointment at the closing of the Tevatron is tempered by my wonderful memories of my time at Fermilab, when the Tevatron was cranking out discoveries and it was the center of the high-energy physics world."