A group of physicists at the Tevatron accelerator at USA, announced that he had succeeded for the first time in producing a quark through a very rare reaction. To achieve this, it took 20 years of research and more than 500 trillionmillions particle collisions.
The quarks are elementary particles, they do not divide further, and among other things make up the protons and neutrons found in the nuclei of atoms. There are different types of 6: top, bottom, paradox, charming, top and quark bottom.
Of these types, the top quarks are the heaviest, with a mass slightly greater than the Higgs boson, meaning that the partreatment to them is a complicated task, in which only the LHC particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland and the Tevatron at Fermilab in Chicago have succeeded.
There are many reactions that can lead to the production of top quarks, and the most frequent one was the experimental discovery of the 1995 particle, when scientists took protons with their antiparticles into a reaction involving strong nuclear forces.
Η theory predicted other ways of producing top quarks through weak nuclear forces, which were discovered in the following years at the Tevatron and confirmed by the LHC. But to complete the puzzle of producing the top quark, a specific way, which physicists call the s-channel, was missing.
To locate 40 cases of top quarks created through channel s, under the influence of weak forces, Tevatron's physicists analyzed data of a decade of collisions. According to the researchers, the extremely small chances for these reactions given by theory make them one of the most rare interactions allowed by physics.
"This is a breakthrough that adds to our image of the Standard Model," said James Zigrist, professor of physics at the University of Birkley. "It complements the portrait of one of the elementary particles in the Universe, showing us one of the most rare ways to create it," he concluded.
Tevatron experiments have teamed up scientists from 27 countries who, despite the shutdown of 2011, continue to analyze data from collisions recorded by particle detectors using more developed computational programs and techniques.
