Word: detector
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...suspected that top quarks are routinely produced by the powerful collider at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago. So far, however, a thicket of more ordinary particles has concealed them from view. But the top may not elude discovery much longer. In late October, researchers at Fermilab's Collider Detector found a provocative set of tracks hinting that a top may have briefly materialized, then vanished like a Halloween ghost. The tantalizing event was reported at a conference held at the facility in mid-November. Since then, physicists have talked of little else...
Finding the top is the sort of discovery of which Nobel dreams are made, and the pressure to be first has become particularly intense now that the Collider Detector has a competitor on its tail, a rival Fermilab detector that began generating its own data last May. The sense of urgency has intensified arguments among the Collider Detector's 400 experimentalists over how to interpret the whispery tracks that appeared in October inside the device, a conglomeration of electronics and steel that stands 3 1/2 stories tall and weighs 4,500 tons. Through its hollow center, protons and antiprotons, accelerated...
...particles into which a top and its antimatter twin should occasionally decay. Or did they? One clue was the detection of a muon, a close relative of the electron. At least, it appeared to be a muon. The reason scientists aren't sure is that the portion of the detector responsible for tracking muons is segmented like an orange. "And with the malice often displayed by inanimate objects," says University of Chicago physicist Henry Frisch with a sigh, "this muon went right up a crack between the segments...
Since 1990, he has been associate department head of the Collider Detector at Fermi, where he has worked since...
Huth and Franklin have collaborated on a number of projects involving the Collider Detector at Fermi. They met in 1981 while working as graduate students at the Stanford Linear Accelerator...