Particle physics or high-energy physics is the study of fundamental particles and forces that constitute matter and radiation. The field also studies combinations of elementary particles up to the scale of protons and neutrons, while the study of combination of protons and neutrons is called nuclear physics.
The Tevatron was a circular particle accelerator in the United States, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, east of Batavia, Illinois, and was the highest energy particle collider until the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) was built near Geneva, Switzerland. The Tevatron was a synchrotron that accelerated protons and antiprotons in a 6.28 km (3.90 mi) circumference ring to energies of up to 1 TeV, hence its name. The Tevatron was completed in 1983 at a cost of $120 million and significant upgrade investments were made during its active years of 1983–2011.
The top quark, sometimes also referred to as the truth quark, is the most massive of all observed elementary particles. It derives its mass from its coupling to the Higgs Boson. This coupling is very close to unity; in the Standard Model of particle physics, it is the largest (strongest) coupling at the scale of the weak interactions and above. The top quark was discovered in 1995 by the CDF and DØ experiments at Fermilab.
In particle physics, the W and Z bosons are vector bosons that are together known as the weak bosons or more generally as the intermediate vector bosons. These elementary particles mediate the weak interaction; the respective symbols are
W+
,
W−
, and
Z0
. The
W±
bosons have either a positive or negative electric charge of 1 elementary charge and are each other's antiparticles. The
Z0
boson is electrically neutral and is its own antiparticle. The three particles each have a spin of 1. The
W±
bosons have a magnetic moment, but the
Z0
has none. All three of these particles are very short-lived, with a half-life of about 3×10−25 s. Their experimental discovery was pivotal in establishing what is now called the Standard Model of particle physics.
The Large Electron–Positron Collider (LEP) was one of the largest particle accelerators ever constructed. It was built at CERN, a multi-national centre for research in nuclear and particle physics near Geneva, Switzerland.
The Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) experimental collaboration studies high energy particle collisions from the Tevatron, the world's former highest-energy particle accelerator. The goal is to discover the identity and properties of the particles that make up the universe and to understand the forces and interactions between those particles.
The DØ experiment was a worldwide collaboration of scientists conducting research on the fundamental nature of matter. DØ was one of two major experiments located at the Tevatron Collider at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. The Tevatron was the world's highest-energy accelerator from 1983 until 2009, when its energy was surpassed by the Large Hadron Collider. The DØ experiment stopped taking data in 2011, when the Tevatron shut down, but data analysis is still ongoing. The DØ detector is preserved in Fermilab's DØ Assembly Building as part of a historical exhibit for public tours.
Leptoquarks are hypothetical particles that would interact with quarks and leptons. Leptoquarks are color-triplet bosons that carry both lepton and baryon numbers. Their other quantum numbers, like spin, (fractional) electric charge and weak isospin vary among models. Leptoquarks are encountered in various extensions of the Standard Model, such as technicolor theories, theories of quark–lepton unification (e.g., Pati–Salam model), or GUTs based on SU(5), SO(10), E6, etc. Leptoquarks are currently searched for in experiments ATLAS and CMS at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN.
Chris Quigg is an American theoretical physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab). He graduated from Yale University in 1966 and received his Ph.D. in 1970 under the tutelage of J. D. Jackson at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been an associate professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, State University of New York, Stony Brook, and was head of the Theoretical Physics Department at Fermilab from 1977 to 1987.
The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Standard Model, the Higgs particle is a massive scalar boson with zero spin, even (positive) parity, no electric charge, and no colour charge that couples to mass. It is also very unstable, decaying into other particles almost immediately upon generation.
In particle physics, W′ and Z′ bosons refer to hypothetical gauge bosons that arise from extensions of the electroweak symmetry of the Standard Model. They are named in analogy with the Standard Model W and Z bosons.
Don Lincoln is an American physicist, author, host of the YouTube channel Fermilab, and science communicator. He conducts research in particle physics at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and was an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, although he is no longer affiliated with the university. He received a Ph.D. in experimental particle physics from Rice University in 1994. In 1995, he was a co-discoverer of the top quark. He has co-authored hundreds of research papers, and more recently, was a member of the team that discovered the Higgs boson in 2012.
The search for the Higgs boson was a 40-year effort by physicists to prove the existence or non-existence of the Higgs boson, first theorised in the 1960s. The Higgs boson was the last unobserved fundamental particle in the Standard Model of particle physics, and its discovery was described as being the "ultimate verification" of the Standard Model. In March 2013, the Higgs boson was officially confirmed to exist.
Ashutosh Vijay Kotwal is an American particle physicist of Indian origin. He is the Fritz London Professor of Physics at Duke University, and conducts research in particle physics related to W bosons and the Higgs boson and searches for new particles and forces.
Paul Dutton Grannis is an American physicist.
Paraskevas Andreas Sphicas is a particle physicist who focuses on studies of High energy collisions in the Large Hadron Collider through which he explores supersymmetry and the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking. He is a senior scientist at CERN and professor of physics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2019.
Tulika Bose is a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, whose research focuses on developing triggers for experimental searches of new phenomena in high energy physics. Bose is a leader within the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment, a CERN collaboration famous for its experimental observation of the Higgs boson in 2012.
Bradley Cox is an American physicist, academic and researcher. He is a Professor of Physics and the founder of the High Energy Physics Group at the University of Virginia.
Meenakshi Narain was an Indian-born American experimental physicist. She was a Professor of Physics and Chair of the Department of Physics at Brown University, and was also Chair of the Collaboration Board of U.S. institutions in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Collaboration. She contributed to the discovery of the top quark in 1995 and Higgs Boson in 2012.
Cecilia Elena Gerber is an Argentine-American experimental high-energy physicist whose research involves massive elementary particles: the top quark and Higgs boson. She is UIC Distinguished Professor of Physics and director of undergraduate studies in physics at the University of Illinois Chicago, and the co-director of the LHC Physics Center at Fermilab. Her research has included participation in the DØ experiment at Fermilab and the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in France and Switzerland.
