when texas a&m university physicist david toback was elected three years ago as co-spokesperson for the cdf collaboration at the us department of energys fermi national accelerator laboratory (fermilab) he had one primary goal: to help the groups 400-person active author list publish the collaborations important legacy papers and final results dr david toback although the collider detector at fermilab experiment representing 63 institutions in 15 countries was no longer collecting new data when toback assumed his leadership role on june 1 2014 its impact lives on in its analysis which recently resulted in the collaborations landmark 700th paper published in physical review d and shedding new light on the production rate of charm quarks fermilabs tevatron and cerns large hadron collider (lhc) are the past and current record holders respectively for the most powerful particle collider on earth after 26 years of colliding particles the tevatron shut down on september 29 2011 with the completion of the lhc however because it observed collisons between protons and antiprotons via its two detectors the three-story 6 000-ton cdf along with its companion dzero toback notes that the tevatron produced fundamental results that can neither be achieved nor replicated at the lhc we are excited about this milestone publication toback said we are equally excited about the measurements of the mass of the w-boson and the mass of the top quark coming out soon both will be comparable to if not better than those of the lhc a member of the texas a&m faculty since 2000 toback currently serves as the arthur j and wilhelmina d thaman professor for undergraduate teaching excellence and is a member of the george p and cynthia woods mitchell institute for fundamental physics and astronomy elected as a fellow of the american physical society in 2015 he is the author of the popular textbook big bang black holes no math and originator of the related undergraduate course offered by the texas a&m department of physics and astronomy toback who is now in his second two-year term as cdf co-spokesperson and overall physics coordinator began working with the collaboration in 1991 as a graduate student at the university of chicago in the past he has served as co-convener of the top + beyond the standard model group and also guided the supersymmetry group a leading candidate to explain dark matter and one focus of tobacks study texas a&ms history is more extensive than tobacks with the cdf experiment given that it was co-founded in 1980 by texas a&m physicists peter mcintyre current head of texas a&m physics and astronomy and robert webb texas a&m has had a continuous presence in the collaboration since its inception including four additional physicists toback ricardo eusebi teruki kamon and alexei safonov who either were students or postdoctoral researchers within it and are now among its principal investigators kamon produced the collaborations fourth phd thesis (there are 638 to date) followed by toback (159th 1997) safonov (242nd 2001) and eusebi (345th 2005) all four played lead roles in tevatron run ii with toback leading the team that built the timing system for the cdf electromagnetic calorimeter toback offering career guidance and inspiration to a past group of pearson mechanics scholars in addition to faculty contributions toback notes that 11 texas a&m students have earned phds based on cdf-related work: ziqing hong (toback 2015); jonathan asaadi (toback 2012) adam aurisano (toback 2012); andrey elagin (safonov 2011); eunsin lee (toback 2010); vadim khotilovich (safonov and kamon 2008); peter wagner (toback 2007); vyachelav krutelyov (kamon 2005); james done (kamon 1999); louis keeble (mcintyre 1992) and timothy hessing (webb 1990) wagners was recognized as the 2007 universities research associations graduate thesis of the year many more texas a&m students achieved masters degrees and/or did honors undergraduate thesis-related work with cdf in addition many within this collective cdf-inspired whole have gone on to faculty positions including at texas a&m and other prestigious research universities worldwide the collaborations crowning achievements include discovery of the top quark in 1995 and detection of the first substantive evidence of the higgs boson prior to the large hadron colliders 2012 full discovery that collectively resulted in peter higgs and francois englerts subsequent 2013 nobel prize in physics for theoretically predicting the elusive particles existence 50 years ago to learn more about cdf visit http://www-cdffnalgov/collaboration/ for more information on texas a&m collider physics go to http://colliderphysicstamuedu/ read more on the story in tobacks own words via the fermilab at work blog # # # # # # # # # # about research at texas a&m university: as one of the worlds leading research institutions texas a&m is at the forefront in making significant contributions to scholarship and discovery including that of science and technology research conducted at texas a&m represented annual expenditures of more than $8927 million in fiscal year 2016 texas a&m ranked in the top 20 of the national science foundations higher education research and development survey (2015) based on expenditures of more than $8666 million in fiscal year 2015 texas a&ms research creates new knowledge that provides basic fundamental and applied contributions resulting in many cases in economic benefits to the state nation and world to learn more visit http://researchtamuedu -atm- contact: shana k hutchins (979) 862-1237 or david toback (979) 845-7717 or toback@tamuedu