Word: quarks
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...reduced a once bewildering array of subatomic particles to just a few fundamental constituents. These include three pairs of light particles known as leptons, of which the negatively charged electron and chargeless neutrino are the most familiar, and three pairs of heavier particles known by the whimsical name of quarks. "Up" and "down" quarks combine to create protons and neutrons, the components of everyday matter, while "charm" and "strange" quarks conspire to make more exotic particles, the sort produced in deep space by quasars and high-energy cosmic rays. In 1977, when a fifth quark called "bottom" was discovered, physicists...
That partner turns out to be well worth years of searching. Its apparent characteristics contain intriguing hints of an unexplored microcosmos, one that may be populated by particles far odder than any discovered to date. For the top quark is extraordinarily heavy. It is, to be exact, 200 times heavier than a proton and almost as hefty as an entire atom of gold. That an elementary particle can weigh so much, says University of Chicago physicist Henry Frisch, amounts to a "tantalizing clue." It suggests that the top is intricately entwined with the mysterious mechanism that is responsible for creating...
...original top quarks supposedly emerged from the roiling sea of primordial radiation less than a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Then, as the universe expanded and cooled, they all but disappeared. Now they occur naturally only under certain conditions. To conjure them up, scientists have to re-create the fiery conditions that followed the Big Bang, not an easy task. Because the top is so heavy, only the most energetic collisions in the Tevatron are capable of producing the particle at all. In addition, this king of quarks has such an infinitesimal lifetime that its presence...
...search for the top quark taught its hunters the true meaning of the word marathon. "This has been a part of my life for so long," says Harvard University physicist John Huth, "that there's a sense of exhaustion." The time scientists once spent working with the detector is now consumed by meetings, some 20 a week.When the CDF team comes together, it is so large it must convene in the Fermilab auditorium, and the result sometimes resembles pandemonium. The 152-page paper reporting evidence for the top quark was sent off to the Physical Review two weeks...
...more data are collected, not just by CDF but by a rival detector that goes by the name of DZero. If the top really is out there, as most physicists believe, then it will gradually come into focus. If not, even greater excitement will ensue. For if the top quark is not creating those bursts of particles deep inside the detector, then what...