Fermi lab has observed a single top quark. If you know anything about quarks, especially top quarks, you will know that this is extraordinary. Top quarks, generated using the Strong Nuclear Force have been observed in the past, but a single top quark is generated with the Weak Nuclear Force. This is apparently very hard to do, but Fermilab has done it.
The following is, apparently, what a top quark ... a single top quark ... looks like:
Its in there somewhere, trust me.
Details here: Take That LHC: Fermi Scores Again In Discovering Rare Single Top Quark
More like this
A Hadron is a kind of particle, made of quarks. There are two kinds of hadrons, baryons (made out of three quarks) and mesons (made out of a quark and a quirky quark known as an antiquark).
From Gordon via Chad Fermilab is claiming single top quark decay to b quark + W
Since I found myself talking about particle physics yesterday, and since I find myself in the middle of a seasonal allergy flare-up that's sapping my bloggy motivation, I thought I would dust off and re-post some old ar
Actually, the awards will include other sorts of blogging, too, but it's the awards for science blogging that have a fast-approaching nomination deadline.
Looks to me kind of like that Mohenjo-Daro mandala they used, or abused, in Mimsy. Probably not an accident.
This is awesome. Win for Fermi and for particle physics.
Also to clarify: The picture given is a picture of a series of collisions that involved the creation of an isolated top quark. It is not a picture of a top quark itself. (At least that's how I understand it. I am not a physicist)
Just to clarify, it doesn't look very much like that Mohenjo-Daro mandala, and to the extent that it does, it's probably an accident.
One further clarification, this is not a naked top quark which is not part of a meson or baryon -- it's a top-quark without its anti-matter partner. Some weak processes, QCD processes and electromagnetic processes naturally produce equal-and-opposite pairs of matter and anti-matter. Here, a rare weak force process resulted in a quark-antiquark pair which was not top-antitop.
http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.0885
CF: Figure 1 which shows processes which involve only the W boson.
Or else it could be that time of year when silliness reigns and you can't trust any news story you read.