CDF - a massive detector for a massive particle

18 November 1998

CDF - a massive detector for a massive particle Display high resolution image

Last week's image showed some of the 450-strong CDF team - one of the two teams at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in the US that found evidence for Nature's heaviest known subatomic particle, the top quark. This week we see the size and complexity of the apparatus necessary for such a discovery. The CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) shown here weighs 5000 tonnes and is as high as a three-storey building. The top quark itself weighs in at about 340,000 times the mass of the electron, the first subatomic particle just found over 100 years ago. Applying a similar scale factor to the mass of the CDF detector gives a result of 15 kg, probably not much different from the total mass of the apparatus that J.J.Thomson used in Cambridge in his discovery of the electron!

Credit: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

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