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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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: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.

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.

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: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: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: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: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.