A quark "starburst"

24 December 1997
Seasons greetings and best wishes for a prosperous New Year to all !

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Energy creates matter in this image from the ALEPH experiment at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. ALEPH is one of four experiments that study collisions between matter (electrons) and antimatter (positrons) at CERN's Large Electron Positron Collider (LEP). When they come close enough an electron and positron annihilate into a burst of energy, which immediately rematerialises as matter, according to Einstein's equation, E= mc2. In this case, the energy materialised as two quarks and two antiquarks, which cannot exist alone but instead form "jets" of particles. These shoot out into the detector from the interaction point to leave an attractive spray of tracks.

(The LEP collider and its experiments were shut down to make way for a new machine, the LHC, in November 2000.)

Credit: CERN / ALEPH

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