The acceleration is undertaken in a number of stages. The first stage is the 750 keV Cockcroft-Walton pre-accelerator which ionizes hydrogen gas and accelerates the negative ions created using a positive voltage. The ions then pass into the 150 meter long linear accelerator (linac) which uses oscillating electrical fields to accelerate the ions to 400 MeV. The ions then pass through a carbon foil, to remove the electrons, and the charged protons then move into the Booster.
The Booster is a small circular magnetic accelerator, the protons are passed around the Booster up to 20,000 times to attain an energy of around 8 GeV. From the Booster the particles pass into the Main Injector, which was completed in 1999 to perform a number of tasks. It can accelerate protons up to 150 GeV; it can produce 120 GeV protons for antiproton creation; it can increase antiproton energy to 120 GeV and it inject protons or antiprotons into the Tevatron. The antiprotons are created by the Antiproton Source, 120 GeV protons are collided with a nickel target producing a range of particles including antiprotons which can be collected and stored in the accumulator ring. The ring can then pass the antiprotons to the Main Injector.
The Tevatron can accelerate the particles from the Main Injector up to 1 TeV (actually 980 GeV), within 320 km/hr of the speed of light. The protons and antiprotons are accelerated in opposite directions, crossing paths in the CDF and D0 (zero) detectors to collide at 1.96 TeV. To hold the particles on track the Tevatron uses superconducting dipole magnets cooled in liquid helium producing 4.2 Tesla.