Word: quark
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...basic "family" of particles is supplemented by two more exotic families, each of which has a parallel structure: two quarks, a type of electron and a type of neutrino. These two extra families are all but extinct in the modern universe, but they apparently existed in the searing heat of the Big Bang, and only accelerators can re-create them. In fact, all of the quarks in all of the families have been found or re-created -- except for the one called the top, which is believed to be the heaviest of all (its mass is at least 90 times...
Fermilab. The machine most likely to find the top quark first is Fermilab's mighty Tevatron, which has been operating for 6 1/2 years beneath the waving grasses of the Illinois prairie. In the Tevatron, strong magnets guide subatomic particles through a circular tunnel that is 6.4 km (4 miles) in circumference. The accelerator is built as a ring so that particles can go around the track again and again, picking up speed with each lap. The ring was built large so that the particles would not have to make sharp turns...
There are no doubt plenty of frontiers left for CERN to push back. Though LEP does not appear to be powerful enough to find the top quark, the "clean" electron-positron collisions could reveal many other exotic phenomena. One long shot is the much-sought Higgs boson, named for British theoretical physicist Peter Higgs, one of the first to recognize its importance. According to some theories, the Higgs boson is what gives all particles their mass. The idea is that everything in the universe is awash in a seaof Higgs bosons, and particles acquire their mass by swimming through this...
...ideas in theoretical physics. Superstring theory holds that every particle is really a vibrating loop of stringlike material that exists in ten-dimensional space (most of these dimensions are confined to such a small scale that we never notice them). Whether the string takes on the role of a quark or an electron or a Higgs boson depends simply on how it vibrates...
...life, which is less than a trillionth of a trillionth of a second, will reveal how many sorts of particles the Z 0 decays into and thus how many other particles exist. Current theory says there may be only one fundamental particle of matter, called the top quark, left to observe. But there may be many more, and gauging the Z 0's lifetime will tell physicists how close they are to a full understanding of the particle menagerie...