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
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or Paperback
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Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
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.