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Article: Beyond the top: now that physicists have found the top quark, what's next?(Cover Story)
- Article from:
- Science News
- Article date:
- July 1, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Science Service, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The excitement has died down. The clamor has subsided. The top quark is finally in the bag.
But for more than 850 physicists working at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Ill., the pursuit goes on. Protons still smash into antiprotons at the Tevatron collider. Massive detectors continue to record the results of these high-energy collisions. Researchers painstakingly sift through vast quantities of data, looking for the top quark's characteristic, but exceedingly rare, signature.
The emphasis has now shifted from finding the top quark to revealing this shadowy particle's true identity--reconstructing and pinpointing its mass, ...