In particle physics, an elementary particle or fundamental particle is a subatomic particle that is not composed of other particles. The Standard Model presently recognizes seventeen distinct particles—twelve fermions and five bosons. As a consequence of flavor and color combinations and antimatter, the fermions and bosons are known to have 48 and 13 variations, respectively. Among the 61 elementary particles embraced by the Standard Model number: electrons and other leptons, quarks, and the fundamental bosons. Subatomic particles such as protons or neutrons, which contain two or more elementary particles, are known as composite particles.
Leon Max Lederman was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was resident scholar emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.
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.
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.
The timeline of particle physics lists the sequence of particle physics theories and discoveries in chronological order. The most modern developments follow the scientific development of the discipline of particle physics.
QuarkNet is a long-term, research-based teacher professional development program in the United States jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy. Since 1999, QuarkNet has established centers at universities and national laboratories conducting research in particle physics across the United States, and have been bringing such physics to high school classrooms. QuarkNet programs are designed and conducted according to “best practices” described in the National Research Council National Science Education Standards report (1995) and support the Next Generation Science Standards (2013).
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.
Arie Bodek is an American experimental particle physicist and the George E. Pake Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester.
Joseph Incandela is an American particle physicist, a professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara and currently based at CERN, where he spent two years as the spokesperson for the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.
Sir Tejinder Singh Virdee,, is a Kenyan-born British experimental particle physicist and Professor of Physics at Imperial College London. He is best known for originating the concept of the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) with a few other colleagues and has been referred to as one of the 'founding fathers' of the project. CMS is a world-wide collaboration which started in 1991 and now has over 3500 participants from 45 countries.
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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.
Oliver Buchmueller is a scientist and professor of physics at the Faculty of Natural Science, Imperial College London. Buchmueller is presently serving as one of the lead scientists on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the principal investigator of the Atom Interferometer Observatory and Network and also one of the lead authors at Atomic Experiment for Dark Matter and Gravity Exploration in Space (AEDGE). Previously he has been associated with the ALEPH experiment at CERN’s LEP collider and the BaBar experiment at SLAC. Buchmueller was among the group of scientists responsible for the discovery of Higgs Boson particle at the LHC, CERN and later in the scientific exploration to find the traces of dark matter through the LHC.
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.
