A team of physicists at the Tevatron accelerator in the US has announced that they have for the first time managed to produce 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, the top quarks are heavier, with a mass slightly larger than the Higgs particle, which means that their production is a complex case in which only the LHC particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland and Tevatron at Fermilab 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.
The theory also provided other ways to produce top quarks through weak nuclear forces that were discovered in Tevatron in the coming years and confirmed by the LHC. But to complete the puzzles of top quark production there was no specific way that physicists call canal.
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 an important discovery, which adds to the picture that we have for the Standard Standard," said James Ziegrist, a physics professor at the University of Berkeley. "Comppays the portrait of one of the elementary particles in the Universe, showing us one of the rarest 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.
