Fermilab Not Dead Yet, Discovers Rare Single Top Quark 194
Several sources are reporting that in spite of LHC hype, Fermilab's Tevatron has produced another feat for scientific discovery. Currently the world's most powerful operating particle accelerator, the Tevatron has allowed researchers to observe a rare single Top Quark. "Previously, top quarks had only been observed when produced by the strong nuclear force. That interaction leads to the production of pairs of top quarks. The production of single top quarks, which involves the weak nuclear force and is harder to identify experimentally, has now been observed, almost 14 years to the day of the top quark discovery in 1995."
And (Score:5, Funny)
This quark was not charmed by being photographed.
Re:And (Score:5, Funny)
That sounds rather strange.
Re:And (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And (Score:5, Funny)
Should I mod this "up" or "down" ?
If we measure, won't that change the outcome?
Re:And (Score:5, Funny)
Should I mod this "up" or "down" ?
If we measure, won't that change the outcome?
We should let it simultaneously exist as funny and not exist as funny.
Re:And (Score:5, Funny)
We should let it simultaneously exist as funny and not exist as funny.
Well that certainly puts a spin on things.
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Sorry, but I think this gag's 1x10^-25 seconds are up.
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Yep, it descretely walked the planck a while ago...
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Calm down and have a beer [angryflower.com].
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I hope you collapse into a deathly state, or get entangled with a bus, or both.
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That would be almost as spooky as pink ponies!
Re:And (Score:5, Funny)
I think there is a high probability this thread will collapse into a series of bad puns.
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Damn. And it'll take an act of Heisenbergian uncertainty to escape from the pun-singularity.
I've clearly not made it out yet.
At least no one outside the event horizon can see me in here.
Right? Right?!?!
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I was once modded -5: Anti-funny, but that on another Slashdot. You should see how this story looked there, when they discovered the top antiquark.
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I could tell you, but then I'd have to shoot Schrodinger's cat.
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If it gets modded up, you can color me tickled pink.
not to gluon the point, but that seems like a rather strong interaction.
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Re:And (Score:5, Funny)
It's going to be hard to top that one. And... uh... my bottom hurts.
(that last one was a stretch I know)
Re:And (Score:5, Funny)
And... uh... my bottom hurts.....a stretch I know
sounds like your charm and beauty led to a strange coupling
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Interesting. What is the cost to the taxpayers of Fermilab? How much is being spent on developing nuclear fusion?
Cosmology is less applicable but rarely gets much federal funding. High-energy physics is enormously useful, but it takes quite a while for the application to appear.
Grant requests always give justification for experiments. Press releases, not always -- they expect you to do some minimum of research yourself.
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Fermilab? The power bill is the expensive part. Last year they got their budget cut so much they had to get private funding or else they'd close.
I don't know the exact amount, but it's not a whole lot compared to a lot of other science programs.
Re:And (Score:5, Informative)
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And as final tongue-in-cheek example, have you used the Internet lately? Invented at CERN.
WWW, not Internet. Some of us were perfectly happy with our Gopher and FTP before the new-fangled web stuff came along.
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Re:And (Score:5, Informative)
And as final tongue-in-cheek example, have you used the Internet lately? Invented at CERN.
I'm guessing by "tongue-in-cheek" you mean "totally wrong".
The Internet was not invented at CERN -- it was invented by DARPA back in 1969 -- the World Wide Web (more specifically, HTTP) was invented at CERN.
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Al Gore created both the internet and world wide web, you idiots!
Re:And (Score:4, Insightful)
The Internet was not invented at CERN -- it was invented by DARPA back in 1969
Not quite. DARPAnet was hardly 'Internet' as we know it, since the Internet is best defined as a collection of protocols and so much has changed since the DARPA days. For one example it used NCP to move data, TCP/IP and DNS were to follow in the 80's. BGP was standardised even later (1989). The internet as we know it was whole by the time the web was ready, but by then removed enough from what was happening with DARPAnet. Right now, we're yet to see true Internet 2.0 be ready (IPV6, DNSSEC whatever the hell else), but at some point all the old protocols will be redundant and you could say the internet has been replaced.
Particle physics is generating huge volumes of data. I remember hearing about physicists needing to move a 40 terabyte set of data internationally in 1996 -- in the end they had to do it by a literal container load of disks. Today worldwide research networks (Yes, Internet 2.0, cliche) can move this data over fibre in practical time frames. LHC will be producing mind boggling amounts.
It's this kind of bleeding edge usage of the internet that is driving infrastructure development forward. Dollars spent at Fermi lab and the like have nontrivial indirect benefits this way. I would argue that the pool of research money that drove universities to need to connect up internationally and spawn the Internet 1.0 has much more than been paid off in gains to the global economy.
That's the justification for keeping this research going even in a worldwide recession.
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World Wide Web (invented at CERN) != Internet (invented by Al Gore).
Re:And (Score:5, Funny)
>>The superconducting magnets used in an MRI machine come out of particle accelerators.
I can't count the number of times people have stolen the super-conducting magnets from my particle accelerator to make MRI machines. Right now I'm stuck with a backlog of stationary particles in a jar in my back shed. I tried accelerating them by putting them in the passenger seat and driving down the road really fast, but it just wasn't the same
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Re:And (Score:4, Interesting)
Just a few examples from Fermilab:
ACP/MAPS: One of the pioneers in the use of massively parallel computers in science. Built and designed at Fermilab, was once the top of the super computer list.
IBM Farms: Inspired IBM's SP1, which has then lead to the Blue Gene series of computers. The Farms, both IBM and SGI, at Fermilab also pioneered the use of computer farms. It may be where the term "farm" originated.
Fermilab was a very early adopter of Linux. Bob Young, one of the founders of RedHat, credits that adoption with the early success of Linux.
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Re:And (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:And (Score:4, Insightful)
One might argue that without establishments such as the Royal Society, a lot of great scientists in Great Britain might never have been able to publish.
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What are your criteria? Does research which has no practical application whatsoever but advances understanding of the whole get swept under the carpet?
Then it has practical application. A way, used today, is to consider citations, implications of the work, whether it advances understanding of the whole, etc. To claim that you can't "evaluate" this work is grossly anti-scientific.
Re:And (Score:5, Insightful)
Ha. Fourier was proud of being a pure mathematician. Today, his works are amongst the most applied in just about every digital processing system.
Re:And (Score:4, Funny)
That's what makes it the sweetest revenge against his kind.
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I once wrote that if Fourier had known that his work would lead to Britney Spears CDs, he'd have burned his notes and joined a monastery.
Re:And (Score:4, Insightful)
I know, right? Let's stop trying to understand universal truths that are important enough to transcend human beings and their planet and their entire existence, and instead go back to being lowly pointless animals. Where were you since antiquity, you savior you?
Tax payers have funded worse things than science. By your logic, most of pure mathematics should not be funded or encouraged either, in which case neither you nor JFK would have ever thought twice about the moon (that bright thing in the heavens), and your talk of nuclear physics would get you burnt at a stake. Knowledge is more important than breeding.
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I think high energy physics and cosmology should always predicate the latest sexy experiment with some justification given the expense to the taxpayers as to what the applicability of all this is.
The cost of these experiments should be measured in F-16 fighters or something like that instead of dollars, it would make it seem negligable.
Just look at the budget in the USA and you'll see that most of the money goes to the industry of death, so they spend it on destruction instead of creativity.
Yet this fact seems to be brainwashed out of the publics' mind, so instead of protesting against the outrageous military spendings, people are whining about some Fermilab research budget. Pathetic!
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Fission doesn't have to be the wasteful, inefficient, and proliferation-prone mess that it is today. There are more efficient, less proliferation-prone ways [nationalcenter.org] to provide fission-based power than wasting 98%+ of the energy in the fuel rods and storing the 'waste' in the open.
Most estimates place the reserves of usable fuel for breeders at 600,000+ years at current consumption. That's not bad!
I agree that fusion may well be the best answer, but do we have the luxury of waiting for it to be ready for prime time?
Re:And (Score:4, Funny)
This quark was not charmed by being photographed.
Strange.
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It was a quantum finish!
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Agreed. Moderators were distracted by the plethora of particular humor above, and didn't notice that this post that was marked "redundant" was posted WAY before most of the jokes above. At 7:43 this was a perfectly legit comment.
Please mods, correct this. This only encourages usage of the FRPoR (first reasonable post or reply) for all future moderation or karma gains. This was quite funny, and I am giving CaptainPatent a +1 in my mind.
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No, but the girl [xkcd.com] was. Ok, a badly drawn stick girl in a webcomic was anyway ;)
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Single top quarks can't be charmed without becoming topless, and then they don't like to be photographed until you ply them with enough drinks that they collapse.
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Dabo!!
I wonder (Score:2)
if school children will ever get taught about quarks. I mean, most 10 year olds can tell you about protons, electrons and neutrons.
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It was in my highschool text book ten years ago. The teacher never got that far, but it was in there.
They're probably still using the same book. I was rather lucky that they had just bought new books, considering it'd been at least 15 years since the last update before that. My book the grade before still had the "raisins in pudding" model of atoms.
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Perhaps when they find some use for quarks, they'll start teaching schoolchildren about them.
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Actually, they don't explain "why" they have +1 charge. Merely elaborate on the idea that they do so.
Note also that the reason that protons have +1 charge isn't especially useful, in and of itself. Interesting, perhaps, but not useful.
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Interesting, perhaps, but not useful.
All the more reason to teach it. We should be trying to get students interested in science.
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You'll get more students interested in science by demonstrating that it's useful and at least slightly fun. You won't get students interested in science by telling them that quarks make the math come out right.
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How the hell can a neutron star post on /.?
Myself, I'm also made of leptons...
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At 10, I could have told you about quarks... But I would've told you that the best use of them involved reciting the Rules of Acquisition.
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If you think quarks are useless, eliminate them from your life and see what happens.
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm. The use of quarks are like saying what is the use of an child.
Coincidentally in this case the answer is the same: Nothing.
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Warning: totally off topic. :)
Actually, I have never liked Star Trek, really. Never watched it, except the old original movies. I think I saw three of them.. I really only liked Spock and Dr. Bones though.
I also wasn't a Star Wars fan, for the most part. I saw them once when I was pretty young, and once again in college, and I've seen Episodes 1 through 3 once each. LOTR is different ;)
I know you were joking, but may as well: homeschooled != nerd, geek, or socially inept. It just means my parents thoug
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My first year of college my roommate and I made a sport of picking the kids that were homeschooled out of groups of people. The defining characteristic? Social awkardness.
Now granted, we may have had plenty of false negatives but we *rarely* had false positives.
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Also you are on
They have laready heard of quarks (Score:2)
Better Post (Score:2, Informative)
You might find Tomasso's piece better - he works with the CDF group.
http://dorigo.wordpress.com/2009/03/05/who-discovered-single-top-production/ [wordpress.com]
Bare/Single quark? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just to be clear, this isn't a single/bare quark w/o a partner is it? As I thought isolating quarks outside of a hadron (w/ 1 or 2 other quarks) was not possible due to the nature of the strong force. Is what they are really saying is that they got an event to force just one top quark to decay once released from a hadron rather than 2 or more at once?
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Yes, quarks produced via the strong (or electromagnetic) interaction are always produced in quark/anti-quark pairs. So a strongly produced top quark would always be produced with an anti-top quark. Those two quarks would not generally end up in the same hadron, but they would both be produced at the same time.
The weak interaction can change quark flavors, so a top quark could be produced from some other flavor of quark, with no anti-top quark being produced in the event. All the quarks will end up in had
Re:Bare/Single quark? (Score:5, Informative)
They are saying that the top quark is being produced one at a time, rather than in pairs (IAAP). It's actually subtle -- what had been observed before were 2 top quarks emerging from a gluon. Now they have observed one top quark (and another quark) emerging from a W-boson. Basically. This is not a major discovery, but it is another important showing off of the 'standard model' working very well at the energies we have so far probed.
Oh, and about isolating quarks. You cannot isolate a quark outside a hadron, but you can 'detect' the quark by observing the hadrons and leptons that it decays into, since they leave a distinct signature. The top quark is special because it decays before it even forms a hadron with other quarks.
it's a faked signal (Score:2, Interesting)
Emphases mine... I am not convinced this isn't a faked signal. With that possibility having a chance of one in four million, how many millions of collisions have they done in the
Re:it's a faked signal (Score:5, Informative)
You aren't quite grasping what he means by one in four million. This wasn't a single event we are talking about here.
The way the statistics work is that you would have to run the entire Fermilab experiment four million times to get what they see from a fake signal. It's a cumulative probability over all the events ever recorded at Fermilab.
They didn't detect it directly. The key to 'detecting' the neutrino is to count up everything else in the remnants collision and notice that it recoils off of something that you didn't detect. It acts as though what you can see in your detector is violating the conservation of energy. But in reality there's an undetectable neutrino zipping through the detector. So you calculate how much energy and in which direction such a neutrino would travel in order to conserve energy, and that's where they get that little diagram.
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Keep in mind that the odds of a neutrino actually interacting with the detectors is orders of magnitude lower than 1 in N where N is the number of observations (trillions, I think).
So, the more detectors, the worse your odds of detecting it are? I think something strange is going on.
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Re:Bare/Single quark? (Score:4, Informative)
Now they have observed one top quark (and another quark) emerging from a W-boson.
Actually that is only one of the single-top processes that we looked for. You can also have a W-boson exchange which changes the flavour of two quarks, one of them into a top. With enough statistics you can distinguish the two different mechanisms and measure their ratio which is a good way to detect new physics.
You cannot isolate a quark outside a hadron... The top quark is special because it decays before it even forms a hadron with other quarks.
So, in fact, you can actually study isolated top quarks which are outside a hadron because the top quark never exists in a bound state. Indeed this is one of the interesting things about the top quark in that you can study the properties of an unbound quark.
Re:Bare/Single quark? (Score:5, Interesting)
Single-top is, however, one of the backgrounds in the search for the Higgs boson. For Fermilab to discover the Higgs, they have to discover single-top first.
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no it is not a 'free' quark. it can be produced as tsbar, tdbar or most likley tbbar as opposed to the more common ttbar pair.
Free quarks? (Score:2)
I remember from the Usenet Physics FAQ [ucr.edu] that quarks are normally bound together too tightly to be observed (although that article is almost fifteen years old). Is this an exception or is something else going on? Have other single quarks been observed too?
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Explanation wanted (Score:2)
The fine article says that this results limits the number of possible quarks. Can someone give an explanation (or even the outline of one) at a level that someone with a B.S. in physics can understand?
Re:Explanation wanted (Score:5, Informative)
One of the things single-top is sensitive to is the coupling strength of the top and bottom quarks via the weak force. The value of this coupling is tightly constrained if one assumes that there are only six quarks (ie. there are three generations of matter). The fact that they measured it and it's within the six quark ballpark means that it is very likely that there isn't another pair of quarks waiting to be discovered.
The basic idea is that if the top and bottom coupling strength is measured to be less than the value we expect for six quarks then that means that some of that coupling strength actually goes to a different, seventh or eighth, quark. But I'm grossly simplifying things here for the general slashdot crowd.
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These posts normally end in [NO CARRIER]
They're normmaly funnier too.
Which came first, the comic or the announcement? (Score:2, Funny)
Seems appropriate. [smbc-comics.com]
Queue the gay, leather scene, quark jokes (Score:2)
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Are the top quarks rarer than the sub bottom quarks?
Yes, but they wear one of eight different colors of gluon in their left pants pocket so you can identify them easily.
pictures k thx (Score:2)
The production of single top quarks, which involves the weak nuclear force and is harder to identify experimentally, has now been observed
Pictures, or it didn't happen.
and its not a 'free' quark (Score:2)
it is just not produced as a ttbar pair, rather it is a tdbar, tsbar or more likley tbbar. Just in case the 'single' confuses anyone.
Does anyone else find it 'strange' that.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Fermilab seemed to be counted out, no longer useful, with the advent of the LHC? How many recent science ventures turned out to be more useful than originally thought, and initially thought less useful than a replacement?
Space station? Hubble telescope? Mars rovers? ... you get the point. Why would anyone count Fermilab out? I just find that odd. Sure, it doesn't have the professed capabilities of the LHC, but then neither does the LHC right now. I seem to remember something about not fixing it if it ain't broke being relatively true.
I expect more from Fermilab too.
This is so much like American Idol or something ... gah!
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Sure, it doesn't have the professed capabilities of the LHC, but then neither does the LHC right now.
Exploding and releasing a lot of gas? [slashdot.org] Fermilab should go for Del Taco, they'd get right back in the game.
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Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm dumb, I think. (Score:3, Interesting)
I thought unbound (single) quarks were didn't exist?
Re:I'm dumb, I think. (Score:4, Funny)
They do, but in the Middle East, they are not permitted to be seen in public without wearing a full atom.
Generally true but not for top (Score:2)
The top quark is unusual in that it only ever exists as an unbound quark. The reason is that it has such a large mass that it decays to a b quark so rapidly that it does not live long enough to become bound.
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1) The single-top isn't the only quark being produced, it's actually produced with a bottom quark at the same time. Usual top quark production is in pairs, one top quark one anti-top quark, but single-top is different; a top quark is produced with a anti-bottom quark.
2) The top quark decays before it can hadronize. That is, it decays before it can pick up a partner quark. This is completely allowed in the Standard Model, but I'm a
Re:size doesn't matter (Score:4, Funny)