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.
From CERN, Oct. 7, 2019: The CMS collaboration has measured for the first time the variation, or “running,” of the top quark mass. The theory of quantum chromodynamics predicts this energy-scale variation for the masses of all quarks and for the strong force acting between them. Observing the running masses of quarks can therefore provide a way of testing quantum chromodynamics and the Standard Model.
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.”
From Duke Today, July 17, 2019: Teams behind the 1995 discovery are recognized for first observations of tiny but hefty particle at the heart of matter.
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.
From Live Science, Feb. 5, 2019: This article dives deep into the little teensy tiny particles that are fundamental building blocks of matter. As far as scientists can tell, quarks themselves are not made of anything smaller. That may change in the future as we learn more, but it’s good enough for now.
From Listverse, Feb. 5, 2019: This listicle mentions Fermilab scientist Melissa Franklin as part of the Fermilab team that discovered the top quark.
From Scientific American, June 6, 2018: Fermilab’s Don Lincoln explains the significance of scientists’ first observation of the famous Higgs boson, responsible for imparting mass, interacting with the heaviest particle in the universe.