The top quark
El quark top
- Date
- 1995 · confidence high
- Place
- Fermilab (Tevatron), Batavia, Illinois, United States
- Credited to
- CDF and DZero Collaborations (Fermilab)
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
The sixth and last quark, with a mass of 173 GeV, similar to that of a gold atom, is discovered in proton-antiproton collisions at 1.8 TeV. It completes the three generations of fermions in the standard model.
Jointly announced on 2 March 1995 by the two experiments.
What it led to
- Complete standard model except for the Higgs
- Constraints on the Higgs mass
- Stability of the electroweak vacuum
- Top-quark physics at the LHC
Built on
- Tau lepton and bottom quark: the third generation1975-1977
- Tevatron and antiproton accumulator
- LEP precision predictions
Made possible
- Silicon vertex detectors