City Room™ - Science - Atom-Smashers Find Rare Single Top Quark

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Atom-Smashers Find Rare Single Top Quark
Produced by Gabriel Spitzer on Monday, March 09, 2009

Diagram of a single top quark collision event. (Photo courtesy of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory)

Scientists at the west-suburban Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a missing link in particle physics.

Fermilab scientists basically ram particles into each other and see what they produce. It’s a little like staging a car crash, then sifting through the junk for your contact lens. To find the single top quark, you’d have to wreck at least 40 billion cars.

Quarks are the building blocks of protons and neutrons, and this is the first time scientists have found them flying solo instead of in pairs. Physicist Jacobo Konigsberg says this find is kind of a dry run for a much bigger prize: the Higgs Boson.

KONIGSBERG: We need to make sure we can see the single top production before we see the Higgs. It’s even rarer, and we need to use similar techniques to the ones we use to find the single top quark.

The Higgs gives mass to all the other particles, and it’s considered the holy grail of particle physics. Fermi scientists are racing to find one before their lab gets bigfooted by a much larger accelerator in Europe.