Word: tollestrup
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Theorists have already deduced that the top quark is heavier than any known particle. "A single top quark," exclaims Fermilab physicist Alvin Tollestrup, "probably weighs at least as much as a whole silver atom does." (With an atomic weight of 108, a silver atom is made up of hundreds of up and down quarks.) Exactly how much top quarks weigh is a question scientists are anxious to answer, but first they must find some to measure -- a task considerably complicated by the fact that in nature these massive but ethereal entities made only a cameo appearance, just after...
...several locations around a track, the particles are either smashed into metallic targets or steered to collide head-on with one another. Most of the new machines opt for the collision technique, which produces more energy. Explains Alvin Tollestrup, a Fermilab physicist: "It's the difference between a semi crashing into a small car and two semis crashing head-on." Some of the tremendous energy of those impacts is fleetingly transformed into strange particles that are thought to have existed in the very first moments of the universe. Before the unstable fragments decay back into energy and more familiar bits...
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