CDF is a complex instrument which records 115,000 pieces of information about each selected event. Event details inside the Tevatron vacuum beam pipe can now be studied even though no detector resides inside that beampipe. In 1992 the original 4,500 ton detector was also upgraded by the addition of 2500 new muon wire chambers and 630 tons of steel, all required to make some of these special event observations possible. The detector is an intelligent microscope, capable of selecting only the events of interest out of the 500,000 p collisions occurring each second during the 1992 collider run. Compared to the classical microscope, this is like having an instrument which can be programmed to select the one exciting specimen out of a collection of 20 billion slides.
Events containing quarks are the specimens of interest described here.
We look for the process . The figure shows a computer generated graphic of an event recorded on magnetic tape. In this view the proton and antiproton beams head into and out of the page at the center of the diagram. The detector forms a 10 meter square box around the beam collision point. The red circle in the lower right hand corner is an expanded view of the innermost 1 centimeter of the 10 meter box.