Top quark

In an attempt to prove their ideas, physicists build bigger and more powerful colliders to hunt for basic particles like the Higgs particle, and the top quark, a shadowy... 

In fact, superconductivity s more important role has little to do with the SSC and the hunt for an elusive top quark. We have superconductivity in hand, have had since 1911, and other countries, notably Japan, are poised to commercialize superconductivity technology. 

In philosophy of science, too often an effort gains in weight and seriousness merely because it requires mastery of an intricate and arcane subject, regardless of the philosophical interest of what it says. Yet, surely, there is something contrived, even phony, in illustrating a philosophical point with a discussion of the top quark if the point... 

As he has done every two years, Dimitri V. Nanopoulos [78, 80] held the latest version of the lecture Beyond the Standard Model of Particle Physics , including the unique World Sheet theory possibly superseding the supersymmetric string theory. Although there is still a small probability for a fourth neutrino, it now seems almost certain that the other leptons and the quarks (-1-2/3 and — 1/3) occur in exactly 3 generations (needing a sixth t-(top) quark, at least heavier than 70 amu or twenty times the h-quark). All the participants... 

The six quarks, namely the up quark (u), the down quark (d), the strange quark (s), the charm quark (c), the top quark (t), sometimes also called truth quark, and the bottom quark (b), also dubbed beauty quark, carry a colour charge. The bosons that act on colour, are called gluons, which are the carriers of the colour interaction. The residue of this interaction is the strong nuclear interaction, which is operative between the hadrons (for instance the proton and the neutron within an atomic nucleus). 

The study of heavy quark production is an important research area at the LHC. Heavy quarks will be produced with a large cross section at a yet unreached center-of-mass energy, enabling precision measurements to improve our understanding of heavy flavor physics. In the context of this work the term heavy quark stands for charm and beauty quarks since the mass of the up, down and strange quark are significantly lower. The heavier top quark has a very short lifetime and does therefore not form bound states of heavy hadrons. 

The discovery of a third generation lepton, the t, recreates technical problems which are resolved by the discovery of a third generation quark, the b (for bottom ). Assuming that the hitherto unobserved partners Ur and the top quark t really exist, we have an enlarged lepton-quark universality between three generations of leptons and three generations of quarks. 

On Tuesday 26 and Wednesday 27 April 1994 nearly simultaneous press conferences in the USA, Italy and Japan announced that evidence for the top quark had been found by the CDF collaboration at Fermilab. In fact most of the information had by then already appeared in a long article in The New York Times and rumours about the discovery had been circulating for some time. 

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