Fermilab Not Dead Yet, Discovers Rare Single Top Quark

Several sources are reporting that in spite of LHC hype, Fermilab's Tevatron has produced another feat for scientific discovery. Currently the world's most powerful operating particle accelerator, the Tevatron has allowed researchers to observe a rare single Top Quark. "Previously, top quarks had only been observed when produced by the strong nuclear force. That interaction leads to the production of pairs of top quarks. The production of single top quarks, which involves the weak nuclear force and is harder to identify experimentally, has now been observed, almost 14 years to the day of the top quark discovery in 1995."

Comments

Bare/Single quark?

[cblack]

Just to be clear, this isn't a single/bare quark w/o a partner is it? As I thought isolating quarks outside of a hadron (w/ 1 or 2 other quarks) was not possible due to the nature of the strong force. Is what they are really saying is that they got an event to force just one top quark to decay once released from a hadron rather than 2 or more at once?

Re:Bare/Single quark?

[Phroon]

This is not a major discovery, but it is another important showing off of the 'standard model' working very well at the energies we have so far probed.

Single-top is, however, one of the backgrounds in the search for the Higgs boson. For Fermilab to discover the Higgs, they have to discover single-top first.

Re:And

[Samschnooks]

It will happen both ways. There'll be a whole Universe created when you mod one way, another for modding another, yet another for not modding, and still others where you don't ask this question and this one where you did ask. Multiverse. Of course I created a universe by posting this. There's another universe where I did not post and instead pleasured myself with some hairy milf porn.

Re:And

[stox]

Just a few examples from Fermilab:

ACP/MAPS: One of the pioneers in the use of massively parallel computers in science. Built and designed at Fermilab, was once the top of the super computer list.

IBM Farms: Inspired IBM's SP1, which has then lead to the Blue Gene series of computers. The Farms, both IBM and SGI, at Fermilab also pioneered the use of computer farms. It may be where the term "farm" originated.

Fermilab was a very early adopter of Linux. Bob Young, one of the founders of RedHat, credits that adoption with the early success of Linux.