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

And

[Mozk]

This quark was not charmed by being photographed.

Re:And

[Amazing Quantum Man]

That sounds rather strange.

Re:And

[CaptainPatent]

This quark was not charmed by being photographed.

Strange.

Re:And

[Anonymous Coward]

Should I mod this "up" or "down" ?

Re:And

[CaptainPatent]

Should I mod this "up" or "down" ?

If we measure, won't that change the outcome?

Re:And

[staryc]

Should I mod this "up" or "down" ?

If we measure, won't that change the outcome?

We should let it simultaneously exist as funny and not exist as funny.

Re:And

[CaptainPatent]

We should let it simultaneously exist as funny and not exist as funny.

Well that certainly puts a spin on things.

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

[interkin3tic]

It's going to be hard to top that one. And... uh... my bottom hurts.

(that last one was a stretch I know)

Re:And

[DrLudicrous]

High energy physics has a rich history of spinoff technologies. Ever had an MRI? The superconducting magnets used in an MRI machine come out of particle accelerators. Massive amounts of data analysis? Talk to a high energy physicist. And as final tongue-in-cheek example, have you used the Internet lately? Invented at CERN.

Re:And

[FiniteSum]

The minute you try to make scientific research into a commodity like this, you will kill all scientific research. Do you think 19th century physicists had iPhones in mind when they were creating rudimentary batteries and experimenting with electromagnetism? Do you think Maxwell only published his famous paper so he could enable the creation of hybrid cars? Could anyone have predicted digital computers? Hell, could the inventors of digital computers have predicted modern desktops?

Re:And

[Anonymous Coward]

And as final tongue-in-cheek example, have you used the Internet lately? Invented at CERN.

WWW, not Internet. Some of us were perfectly happy with our Gopher and FTP before the new-fangled web stuff came along.

Re:And

[AJWM]

And as final tongue-in-cheek example, have you used the Internet lately? Invented at CERN.

I'm guessing by "tongue-in-cheek" you mean "totally wrong".

The Internet was not invented at CERN -- it was invented by DARPA back in 1969 -- the World Wide Web (more specifically, HTTP) was invented at CERN.

Re:And

[rubycodez]

And... uh... my bottom hurts.....a stretch I know

sounds like your charm and beauty led to a strange coupling

Re:And

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

>>High energy physics has a rich history of spinoff technologies. Ever had an MRI?
>>The superconducting magnets used in an MRI machine come out of particle accelerators.

I can't count the number of times people have stolen the super-conducting magnets from my particle accelerator to make MRI machines. Right now I'm stuck with a backlog of stationary particles in a jar in my back shed. I tried accelerating them by putting them in the passenger seat and driving down the road really fast, but it just wasn't the same :-(

Re:And

[markov_chain]

I think there is a high probability this thread will collapse into a series of bad puns.

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.

Re:And

[metlin]

Ha. Fourier was proud of being a pure mathematician. Today, his works are amongst the most applied in just about every digital processing system.

Re:And

[edsyc]

Al Gore created both the internet and world wide web, you idiots!

Re:And

[Plutonite]

I know, right? Let's stop trying to understand universal truths that are important enough to transcend human beings and their planet and their entire existence, and instead go back to being lowly pointless animals. Where were you since antiquity, you savior you?

Tax payers have funded worse things than science. By your logic, most of pure mathematics should not be funded or encouraged either, in which case neither you nor JFK would have ever thought twice about the moon (that bright thing in the heavens), and your talk of nuclear physics would get you burnt at a stake. Knowledge is more important than breeding.

Re:And

[w0mprat]

The Internet was not invented at CERN -- it was invented by DARPA back in 1969

Not quite. DARPAnet was hardly 'Internet' as we know it, since the Internet is best defined as a collection of protocols and so much has changed since the DARPA days. For one example it used NCP to move data, TCP/IP and DNS were to follow in the 80's. BGP was standardised even later (1989). The internet as we know it was whole by the time the web was ready, but by then removed enough from what was happening with DARPAnet. Right now, we're yet to see true Internet 2.0 be ready (IPV6, DNSSEC whatever the hell else), but at some point all the old protocols will be redundant and you could say the internet has been replaced.

Particle physics is generating huge volumes of data. I remember hearing about physicists needing to move a 40 terabyte set of data internationally in 1996 -- in the end they had to do it by a literal container load of disks. Today worldwide research networks (Yes, Internet 2.0, cliche) can move this data over fibre in practical time frames. LHC will be producing mind boggling amounts.

It's this kind of bleeding edge usage of the internet that is driving infrastructure development forward. Dollars spent at Fermi lab and the like have nontrivial indirect benefits this way. I would argue that the pool of research money that drove universities to need to connect up internationally and spawn the Internet 1.0 has much more than been paid off in gains to the global economy.

That's the justification for keeping this research going even in a worldwide recession.

Re:And

[kohaku]

No, no, no! This is not a healthy line of thought! There is absolutely no way you can predict with certainty the future benefits of any scientific research. Even electricity was of uncertain value. The very point of public funding is for research whose benefits aren't obvious, but whose results are a benefit to science as a whole. You say that you believe it is possible to 'evaluate potential research'. How do you go about doing that? What are your criteria? Does research which has no practical application whatsoever but advances understanding of the whole get swept under the carpet?
One might argue that without establishments such as the Royal Society, a lot of great scientists in Great Britain might never have been able to publish.

Re:And

[Dr. Cody]

That's what makes it the sweetest revenge against his kind.

Re:I wonder

[Jamamala]

How about explaining why protons have a +1 charge and neutrons have no charge? I'd say that's pretty useful. Ditto with explaining the charge of the anti-nucleons.

Re:I wonder

[im_thatoneguy]

Hmm. The use of quarks are like saying what is the use of an child.

Coincidentally in this case the answer is the same: Nothing.

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?

[parrillada]

They are saying that the top quark is being produced one at a time, rather than in pairs (IAAP). It's actually subtle -- what had been observed before were 2 top quarks emerging from a gluon. Now they have observed one top quark (and another quark) emerging from a W-boson. Basically. 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.

Oh, and about isolating quarks. You cannot isolate a quark outside a hadron, but you can 'detect' the quark by observing the hadrons and leptons that it decays into, since they leave a distinct signature. The top quark is special because it decays before it even forms a hadron with other quarks.

Re:Bare/Single quark?

[Roger W Moore]

Now they have observed one top quark (and another quark) emerging from a W-boson.

Actually that is only one of the single-top processes that we looked for. You can also have a W-boson exchange which changes the flavour of two quarks, one of them into a top. With enough statistics you can distinguish the two different mechanisms and measure their ratio which is a good way to detect new physics.

You cannot isolate a quark outside a hadron... The top quark is special because it decays before it even forms a hadron with other quarks.

So, in fact, you can actually study isolated top quarks which are outside a hadron because the top quark never exists in a bound state. Indeed this is one of the interesting things about the top quark in that you can study the properties of an unbound quark.

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.

Does anyone else find it 'strange' that....

[zappepcs]

Fermilab seemed to be counted out, no longer useful, with the advent of the LHC? How many recent science ventures turned out to be more useful than originally thought, and initially thought less useful than a replacement?

Space station? Hubble telescope? Mars rovers? ... you get the point. Why would anyone count Fermilab out? I just find that odd. Sure, it doesn't have the professed capabilities of the LHC, but then neither does the LHC right now. I seem to remember something about not fixing it if it ain't broke being relatively true.

I expect more from Fermilab too.

This is so much like American Idol or something ... gah!

Re:I wonder

[dtremenak]

Interesting, perhaps, but not useful.

All the more reason to teach it. We should be trying to get students interested in science.

Re:size doesn't matter

[loganljb]

I think that what this actually demonstrates is that it isn't the size of the accelerator that matters -- it's how long you can keep it running before it explodes.

Re:I'm dumb, I think.

[jd]

They do, but in the Middle East, they are not permitted to be seen in public without wearing a full atom.

Re:it's a faked signal

[Phroon]

Emphases mine... I am not convinced this isn't a faked signal. With that possibility having a chance of one in four million, how many millions of collisions have they done in the past 15 years? Far more than 4 million, I would suspect.

You aren't quite grasping what he means by one in four million. This wasn't a single event we are talking about here.

The way the statistics work is that you would have to run the entire Fermilab experiment four million times to get what they see from a fake signal. It's a cumulative probability over all the events ever recorded at Fermilab.

...and another thing. Look at that diagram showing a muon went here and a neutrino went there - how in the world did they detect that neutrino, I ask? I bet it zipped right through their detector without so much a pausing to say hello.

They didn't detect it directly. The key to 'detecting' the neutrino is to count up everything else in the remnants collision and notice that it recoils off of something that you didn't detect. It acts as though what you can see in your detector is violating the conservation of energy. But in reality there's an undetectable neutrino zipping through the detector. So you calculate how much energy and in which direction such a neutrino would travel in order to conserve energy, and that's where they get that little diagram.

Re:Explanation wanted

[Phroon]

The fine article says that this results limits the number of possible quarks. Can someone give an explanation (or even the outline of one) at a level that someone with a B.S. in physics can understand?

One of the things single-top is sensitive to is the coupling strength of the top and bottom quarks via the weak force. The value of this coupling is tightly constrained if one assumes that there are only six quarks (ie. there are three generations of matter). The fact that they measured it and it's within the six quark ballpark means that it is very likely that there isn't another pair of quarks waiting to be discovered.

The basic idea is that if the top and bottom coupling strength is measured to be less than the value we expect for six quarks then that means that some of that coupling strength actually goes to a different, seventh or eighth, quark. But I'm grossly simplifying things here for the general slashdot crowd.