This story starts in Victorian times, with a huge puzzle. Charles Darwin had convinced biologists that all life has been evolving from simple forms for hundreds of millions of years. But, at the rate the sun is shining, without some unknown fuel it would burn out in less than 20 million years.
In today’s colloquium in One West, Scientist Emeritus Jeff Appel will tell the story of the discovery of the b quark and how it led to studies of more beautiful particles.
Here’s a homework problem for you budding scientists: Figure out how to turn coal into big beautiful diamonds and get very rich.
Do you sometimes wish you were invisible? There was once an invisible man who could walk around and no one could see him.
Does your car talk to you? Does it say things like “In half a mile, turn left”?
A recent CDF result exploits the advantages of the Tevatron’s 900-GeV run. Photo: Reidar Hahn Shortly before the Tevatron passed the baton of providing the highest-energy particle collisions to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, physicists on CDF proposed to spend a few days with colliding beams at lower energy to study the energy dependence of certain reactions. The accelerator experts took up the challenge and delivered. CDF has just published the first physics paper using this low-energy running, measuring…
This plot shows mass spectra of π+π– pairs at center-of-mass energies (√s) of 0.9 and 1.96 TeV and their ratio. The main peak is a spin-2 f meson; there is evidence for spin-0 f mesons at 980 MeV/c2 (not shown here) and 1,370 MeV/c2 and some structures at higher mass. Among all the elementary and composite particles we know, there are a few that have the odd property of being much like the vacuum: They have no electric charge and…
On a sunny day and from the right perspective, a pile of snow on the Fermilab site looks like the French alps. Photo: Mike Albrow, PPD