"Live" events from Fermilab

4 July 2001

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"Fireworks" for 4 July reveal a collision at the world's highest energy particle accelerator - the Tevatron at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. This display is from the experiment called CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) which records the aftermath of head-on collisions between protons and antiprotons at the Tevatron. The detector is like a huge, layered cylinder surrounding the beam pipe where the high-energy protons and antiprotrons collide and annihilate, to create huge bursts of many new particles and antiparticles. One of the layers is the "central calorimeter", designed to record the energy deposited by different kinds of particle. The image gives a 3-d view of the energy deposited there, together with the paths of particles recorded by the particle tracking layers. The pink towers show electromagnetic energy, deposited by electrons, positrons and photons. The blue towers show energy deposited by particles such as protons and pions, which are built from quarks and are known collectively as hadrons. The heights of the towers are proportional to the amount of energy deposited. You can view a closer 3-d view of the tracks in this event, and view a more conventional "end-on" type of display.

Credit: Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory / CDF

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