Twenty five years ago, in March 1995, the CDF and DZero collaborations at the Fermilab Tevatron, announced the discovery of the top quark. Join the virtual celebration of the discovery’s 25th anniversary on Wednesday, Aug. 12, at the Top Quark Silver Jubilee.
The top quark is the heaviest known elementary particle, as small as an electron but 340,000 times more massive! We don’t know how small those particles are, only that they are smaller than 1/1000th the size of a proton which itself is 1/100,000th the size of the smallest atom, hydrogen. Millionths, billionths, … soon we’re talking small numbers!
Twenty-five years ago, scientists on the CDF and DZero particle physics experiments at Fermilab announced one of history’s biggest breakthroughs in particle physics: the discovery of the long-sought top quark. The collaborations on the two experiments jointly made the announcement on March 2, 1995, to much fanfare. We take a look back on this day in Fermilab history a quarter-century ago.
IMSA students on the ground floor of DZero on Nov. 26, 2018. This continues to be one of the best tours at Fermilab. George Ginther and Stefan Gruenendahl always need tour guides. If you want to help with these tours, contact them for details on how to get involved. It is a ton of fun.
On July 15 in Ghent, Belgium, the European Physical Society formally presented the CDF and DZero collaborations with the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize “for the discovery of the top quark and the detailed measurement of its properties.”
The CDF and DZero collaborations at Fermilab announced the discovery of the top quark in 1995, the final undiscovered quark of the six predicted by theory. The biannual prize is given for an outstanding contribution to high-energy and particle physics.
Physicists often find thrifty, ingenious ways to reuse equipment and resources. What do you do about an 800-ton magnet originally used to discover new particles? Send it off on a months-long journey via truck, train and ship halfway across the world to detect oscillating particles called neutrinos, of course. It’s all part of the vast recycling network of the physics community.
Measuring a certain parameter of particles emerging from Tevatron collisions helps us better understand how the unified electromagnetic and weak forces broke into separate distinct entities in the universe’s early moments.
From The New York Times, May 28, 2018: At CERN in Switzerland and Fermilab in Illinois, there is always a sense of discovery — about the past, present and future.
Fermilab has placed a capstone on its study of the forward-backward asymmetry, and the measurements and theory now agree.