U.S. physicists have found the first evidence of single top quarks produced in a subatomic process involving the weak nuclear force.
Scientists of the DZero collaboration at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced the discovery this month. DZero is an international experiment conducted by physicists from 90 institutions and 20 countries.
The physicists say the result is an important test of predictions made by particle theory and, in the longer term, the techniques employed in the analysis will allow scientists to search for an even more elusive particle — the Higgs boson.
Starting from a million billion proton-antiproton collisions produced by Fermilab’s Tevatron, the world’s most powerful particle collider, the DZero collaboration used modern sophisticated analysis techniques to search for about 60 collisions, each containing a single top quark.
“Observing a few single top quarks in a sea of billions of particle collisions represents an extraordinary technical tour de force,” said Robin Staffin, associate director for high energy physics in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. “The power and sophistication of experimental analysis techniques like those developed by the DZero experimenters augur well for exciting discoveries to come.”
