How many physicists did it take to find what some argue might be the last discoverable piece of matter? Nearly 1,000. MSU high energy physicist Maris Abolins was part of the team. He and his group of 20 MSU faculty, post-doctoral associates and student researchers helped build the equipment and analyze the data that ultimately revealed the existence of the Top quark.
Physicists, who look for the answers to the world's oldest questions at the most basic levels, developed the Standard Model, a theory predicting that all matter is made up of six indivisible particles, or quarks, which come in whimsically labeled pairs. By 1977, Up and Down, Charm and Strange, and Bottom had been discovered. The elusive Top was not found until 1995, after an improvement in technology that employed superconductivity in an unprecedented industrial scale to power the magnets at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
"This was a spectacular discovery in a search that began with the ancient Greeks," says Abolins. "We are on the verge of a theory that explains all of Nature. It is a triumph of understanding."
Abolins is already turning to the next stage of high energy physics; finding the source of nonzero mass. In MSU's new Biomedical and Physical Building, he will be connected to the huge amounts of data distributed around the globe from an even more powerful accelerator now being built in Switzerland. State-of-the-art teleconferencing facilities will put him, his colleagues, and students in real-time touch with their scientific teammates around the world.
Physics and astronomy chairperson Raymond Brock underscores the importance of such research. "Pondering the universe, including its increasingly smaller pieces, is at the core of being human. Even though it may seem remote from daily life, esoteric new knowledge has the habit of re-entering the mainstream." For example, medical magnetic imaging has its roots in particle detection techniques used in high energy and nuclear physics. More modern medical imaging comes from the harnessing of superconductivity, considered a curiosity in the early 20th century. Indeed, most modern conveniences epitomized by present-day electronics stem from quantum theory of the 1920s and esoteric solid state physics of the 1950s and 1960s. No physicist, however, can predict with certainty the ultimate utility of the tools and understanding that have led to the discovery of the Top quark.
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