{"id":925,"date":"2006-12-14T10:44:29","date_gmt":"2006-12-14T10:44:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/14\/single-top-quark-seeking-antiq\/"},"modified":"2006-12-14T10:44:29","modified_gmt":"2006-12-14T10:44:29","slug":"single-top-quark-seeking-antiq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/12\/14\/single-top-quark-seeking-antiq\/","title":{"rendered":"Single Top Quark, Seeking Antiquark. No Freaks."},"content":{"rendered":"

The physics story of the moment is probably the detection of single top quarks at Fermilab. Top quarks, like most other exotic particles, are usually produced in particle-antiparticle pairs, with some fraction of the kinetic energy of two colliding particles being converted into the mass of the quark-antiquark pair (see this old post<\/a>). There’s a very rare process, though, mediated by the weak nuclear force, that allows the production of a single top quark, without an anti-top (it’s paired with a bottom quark and a W boson).<\/p>\n

The D0 (or DZero) collaboration at Fermilab recently announced the observation of single top quarks in their data, and links abound. There’s a press release here<\/a>, Gordon Watts provides the view from inside the collaboration<\/a>, as well as links to talk slides<\/a> about the result. Tommaso Dorigo of the CDF collaboration (who are also looking for single tops at Fermilab) has his own report<\/a>, as well as an explanation of the process<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And if you’re wondering how they detect all this stuff, JoAnne Hewett explains detectors<\/a> (or you could check out this old post<\/a>).<\/p>\n

It’s also worth noting exactly what particle physicists mean when they describe a process as “rare”– D0 is reporting the detection of sixty-odd single top quarks. That’s out of a dataset derived from trillions of particle collisions<\/a>. That’s trillions, with a “tr,” the sort of number you usually only see in discussions of planetary GNP. That’s pretty damn impressive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The physics story of the moment is probably the detection of single top quarks at Fermilab. Top quarks, like most other exotic particles, are usually produced in particle-antiparticle pairs, with some fraction of the kinetic energy of two colliding particles being converted into the mass of the quark-antiquark pair (see this old post). There’s a… Continue reading Single Top Quark, Seeking Antiquark. No Freaks.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,33,7,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiment","category-in_the_news","category-physics","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=925"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}