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from the issue of July 20, 2006
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Top quark found to be massive
Greg Snow and Dan Claes, both associate professors of physics and astronomy, are part of the long-running DZero experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside of Chicago that proved the existence of the top quark in 1995.
Now, the experiment has established the top quark's mass at about 178 billion electron volts, give or take 4.3 billion electron volts. The results surprised scientists.
"A quark is supposed to be a fundamental particle," Claes said. "It's supposed to be essentially of no dimension, a point-like object, smaller than anything we can imagine - smaller than a proton, smaller than an electron. And yet the top quark is about 180 times heavier than a proton, it's enormously much more massive, which is a surprise. It's about as heavy as the nucleus of a gold atom."
The result was published in the June 10 issue of Nature, the international weekly journal of science.
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