Events in D0 - Live from Fermilab

21 October 2001

The Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory is currently the world's highest energy particle accelerator, where proton and antiproton beams collide head on at 2 TeV (tera electron volts). This display is from the experiment called D0 (DZero), and it shows a "slice" through the centre of the detector, which is like a huge, layered cylinder surrounding the beam pipe where the high-energy protons and antiprotons collide. The beams come in, unseen, from left and right along the centre of the image to collide at the middle. The inner rectangle contains information from the tracking detectors, and shows the locations of the barrels and disks of the silicon tracker. Colored marks represent hits in these detectors. The outer rectangle represents amounts of energy deposited in the calorimeter, where each coloured block shows the total energy in that region for the top or bottom half of the detector. The red blocks show electromagnetic energy, deposited by electrons, positrons and photons, while the blue blocks show energy deposited by particles such as protons and pions, which are built from quarks and are known collectively as hadrons. The sizes of the blocks are proportional to the amount of energy deposited. You can see an "end-on" display of the same event here.


Credit: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory / D0