Top Quark Discovery Seminar, 1995
Top Quark discovery announcement seminar and press conference, March 2, 1995. Quarks are one of the fundamental building blocks of which the entire universe is constructed. Scientists know of six different quarks, although only two of them (the up and down quarks) are found inside the protons and neutrons at the center of atoms. The other four quarks (strange, charm, bottom and top) are all unstable and decay in fractions of a second. The top quark, also known as the t quark (symbol: t) or truth quark, is the heaviest subatomic particle ever observed, with a mass that is about as heavy as an entire atom of gold. Top quarks are also among the most fleeting of particles, with a lifetime of about a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. Top quarks were first observed at Fermilab in 1995 and the two experiments at Fermilab's Tevatron collider each observed about 150,000 top quarks over their lifetimes. The original studies concentrated on collisions in which a top quark and an antimatter top quark were simultaneously produced. Experiments at Fermilab were also the first to observe top quarks produced one at a time. This was a tricky thing to accomplish because ordinary processes can produce top quark lookalikes. Making two lookalikes at the same time is rare, which makes it easier to separate real top quark events from fakes. To find singly made top quarks required a detailed understanding of the detector.
Size: 4200px × 2817px
Photo credit: © Photo Researchers / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: -atomic, -tomic, 1990s, 2, 1995, 20th, 2nd, accelerator, america, american, announcement, auditorium, blocks, building, bw, century, conference, department, discovery, doe, elementary, energy, fermi, fermilab, fermion, fundamental, heaviest, historic, historical, history, illinois, laboratory, march, national, particle, photo, photograph, physics, press, quark, research, science, seminar, states, subatomic, top, truth, united, usa
