Fermilab in the context of "DØ experiment"

The top quark, sometimes also referred to as the truth quark, (symbol: t) is the most massive of all observed elementary particles. It derives its mass from its coupling to the Higgs field. This coupling y_t is very close to unity; in the Standard Model of particle physics, it is the largest (strongest) coupling at the scale of the weak interactions and above. The top quark was discovered in 1995 by the CDF and DØ experiments at Fermilab.

Like all other quarks, the top quark is a fermion with spin-1/2 and participates in all four fundamental interactions: gravitation, electromagnetism, weak interactions, and strong interactions. It has an electric charge of +⁠ 2 /3⁠ e. It has a mass of 172.76±0.3 GeV/c, which is close to the rhenium atom mass (more precisely, the average of its isotopes). The antiparticle of the top quark is the top antiquark (symbol: t, sometimes called antitop quark or simply antitop), which differs from it only in that some of its properties have equal magnitude but opposite sign.

A scintillator (/ˈsɪntɪleɪtər/ SIN-til-ay-ter) is a material that exhibits scintillation, the property of luminescence, when excited by ionizing radiation. Luminescent materials, when struck by an incoming particle, absorb its energy and scintillate (i.e. re-emit the absorbed energy in the form of light). Sometimes, the excited state is metastable, so the relaxation back down from the excited state to lower states is delayed (necessitating anywhere from a few nanoseconds to hours depending on the material). The process then corresponds to one of two phenomena: delayed fluorescence or phosphorescence. The correspondence depends on the type of transition and hence the wavelength of the emitted optical photon.

The Universities Research Association (URA) is a non-profit association of more than 90 research universities, primarily but not exclusively in the United States. It has members also in Japan, Italy, and the United Kingdom. It was founded in 1965 at the behest of the President's Science Advisory Committee and the National Academy of Sciences to build and operate Fermilab, a National Accelerator Laboratory.

The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experimental collaboration studies high energy particle collisions from the Tevatron, the world's former highest-energy particle accelerator. The goal is to discover the identity and properties of the particles that make up the universe and to understand the forces and interactions between those particles.

CDF is an international collaboration that, at its peak, consisted of about 600 physicists (from about 30 American universities and National laboratories and about 30 groups from universities and national laboratories from Italy, Japan, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, Russia, Finland, France, Taiwan, Korea, and Switzerland). The CDF detector itself weighed about 5000 tons and was about 12 meters in all three dimensions. The goal of the experiment is to measure exceptional events out of the billions of particle collisions in order to:

DONUT (Direct observation of the nu tau, E872) was an experiment at Fermilab dedicated to the search for tau neutrino interactions. The detector operated during a few months in the summer of 1997, and successfully detected the tau neutrino. It confirmed the existence of the last lepton predicted by the Standard Model. The data from the experiment was also used to put an upper limit on the tau neutrino magnetic moment and measure its interaction cross section.

In physical cosmology, baryogenesis (also known as baryosynthesis) is the physical process that is hypothesized to have taken place during the early universe to produce baryonic asymmetry, the observation that only matter (baryons) and not antimatter (antibaryons) is detected in the universe (other than in cosmic ray collisions).Since it is assumed in cosmology that the particles we see were created using the same physics we measure today, and in particle physics experiments today matter and antimatter are always symmetric, the dominance of matter over antimatter is unexplained.

A number of theoretical mechanisms are proposed to account for this discrepancy, namely identifying conditions that favour symmetry breaking and the creation of normal matter (as opposed to antimatter). This imbalance has to be exceptionally small, on the order of 1 in every 1630000000 (≈2×10) particles a small fraction of a second after the Big Bang. After most of the matter and antimatter was annihilated, what remained was all the baryonic matter in the current universe, along with a much greater number of bosons. Experiments reported in 2010 at Fermilab, however, seem to show that this imbalance is much greater than previously assumed. These experiments involved a series of particle collisions and found that the amount of generated matter was approximately 1% larger than the amount of generated antimatter. The reason for this discrepancy is not yet known.

A bubble chamber is a vessel filled with a superheated transparent liquid (most often liquid hydrogen) used to detect electrically charged particles moving through it. It was invented in 1952 by Donald A. Glaser, for which he was awarded the 1960 Nobel Prize in Physics. Supposedly, Glaser was inspired by the bubbles in a glass of beer; however, in a 2006 talk, he refuted this story, although saying that while beer was not the inspiration for the bubble chamber, he did experiments using beer to fill early prototypes.

While bubble chambers were extensively used in the past, they have now mostly been supplanted by wire chambers, spark chambers, drift chambers, and silicon detectors. Notable bubble chambers include the Big European Bubble Chamber (BEBC) and Gargamelle.