top quark

A large and unexpected excess of top quark pairs has the physics community excited, but the interpretation is still up for debate.

On March 2, 1995, the top quark discovery at Fermilab was announced by scientists on the CDF and DZero collaborations, and the sixth and final quark was added to the Standard Model. We ask two members of the collaborations to reflect on this groundbreaking moment in particle physics.

The ATLAS and CMS experiments have observed a process 4,000 times rarer than the production of Higgs bosons.

From the Daily Herald, October 5, 2022: Take a journey down memory lane with the Daily Herald’s chronological listing of milestones, growth and discoveries including Fermilab’s discovery of the top quark, a tiny subatomic particle that can help explain the creation of the universe.

From CERN, Jan. 26, 2021: This week marks the 50th anniversary of the first proton collisions in CERN’s Intersecting Storage Rings, the first hadron collider ever built. To celebrate, see hadron colliders of the last half-century — including the Tevatron and the Large Hadron Collider — through a historical lens, with an eye toward the quest for high luminosity and new energy frontiers.

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.

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.