Since last year, however, they have made major improvements to the detector. CDF uses three different techniques in looking for the top quark. The method involving the Silicon Vertex Detector produced a result 100 times more sensitive than the two other methods, enabling researchers to collect data critical to the discovery. Top quarks can't actually be seen, but as they rapidly decay they produce other particles that can be detected by an array of sophisticated equipment. It is about 200 times more massive than a proton, which is itself made up of two up quarks and one down quark, said Dr. Barnett, vice chairman of the Hopkins Department of Physics and Astronomy.
Strange quarks are a few hundred mega-electron volts.
It's 10 times what one would have guessed 15 years ago. The Hopkins research team includes post-doctoral fellows John Skarha and Rick Snider, and graduate students Douglas Glenzinski, Alan Spies, Jeff Tseng and Jeff Cammerata. Hopkins scientists began collaborating in 1989 with CDF physicists to install the Silicon Vertex Detector. The protons and antiprotons are whipped in opposite directions around the circular track by a system of powerful superconducting magnets called the Tevatron accelerator. These particles quickly decay into a wide array of other kinds of exotic constituents, from muons to pions, neutrinos to kaons, which are monitored by a girdle of nearly 100,000 detectors contained in the CDF detector.