Single top quark detected

Science News ^ | March 10th, 2009 | Solmaz Barazesh

[neverdem]

Same techniques could be used to detect theoretical particles like the Higgs boson

Physicists have identified the production of the elusive single top quark, two research teams report.

Previously top quarks have been observed only when produced in pairs, as when they were initially discovered 14 years ago at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. Now, researchers using Fermilab’s two detectors announced March 9 that they have detected single top quarks. The techniques used to find the singleton quarks could help to identify other rare particles, such as the Higgs boson, the scientists say.

“What a discovery,” comments Nobel laureate David Gross of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “These researchers should be congratulated.”

Quarks are fundamental particles of matter that come in six varieties known as “flavors.” Ordinary matter consists mostly of two quark flavors, the “up” and “down” quarks that make up protons and neutrons. Other quarks are found in exotic subatomic particles or are created in high-energy collisions in particle accelerators. The top quark was the last flavor to be discovered experimentally, in 1995.

Since that time, the two groups at Fermilab, using the CDF and the DZero detectors, have combed through data from billions upon billions of particle collisions, looking for the unique features that would signal a single top quark.

But only about one in every 20 billion collisions produces a single top quark, and that weak signal easily gets lost in the background of other particle debris. “Pairs of top quarks have a more distinctive signature than singles, and so are easier to distinguish,” explains physicist Darien Wood, a spokesman for the DZero group.

The two groups had slightly different methods of analyzing the data, which allowed for healthy competition, says physicist Robert Roser, a...

[AFPhys]

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