Rice Physicists Help Discover Existence of Top Quark

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Rice Physicists Help Discover Existence of Top Quark

Rice physicists played an important role in
the discovery of the top quark, a long-sought building block of the
universe.

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory officials announced today
the top quark was discovered through a collaboration of physicists
from a number of research institutions and universities including
Rice.

Discovering the top quarks confirms physicists’ theories of the
basic underlying laws of nature, said Hannu Miettinen, a Rice
professor of physics and leader of the Rice research team. Although
top quarks may not seem relevant to most people, they are directly
tied to our own existence because these particles were formed in the
first moments of the universe at the same time the matter forming
our world was created.

Physicists had strong theoretical reasons to believe that the
top quark existed, but it had not been seen. For almost two decades,
researchers sought evidence of the elusive particle. It took the
world’s most powerful particle accelerator and three years of data
collection with two giant detectors to end the 18-year-old search.

Miettinen and Geary Eppley, a graduate student, along with two
mathematicians from Rice, developed a new mathematical technique
about two years ago just to attack the problem of finding the top
quark. The method complements and improves on existing methods.

Miettinen and Eppley have worked with the top quark analysis
group at Fermilab for more than a year to help make this discovery.
For nearly two decades, physicists passionately searched for the
top quark to confirm the underlying theory of modern physics.

According to the big bang theory, when the universe was created six
types of quarks came into existence. Of those six, two are found in
ordinary matter and make up the protons and neutrons of atoms. The
remaining four are less stable and can only be detected through the
use of huge particle accelerators.

The Rice physicists are part of the D0 (DZero) research group at
Fermilab in Batavia, Ill. Fermilab is a high-energy physics
laboratory, and the site of a four-mile-circumference particle
accelerator.

Rice physicists participating in the D0 experiment are David
Adams, Iain Bertram, Geary Eppley, Hannu Miettinen, Paul Padley and
Pablo Yepes.