Quarks are the building blocks for heavy particles like protons and neutrons. It was thought that nature makes them in six varieties, but only five had been observed until two teams simultaneously announced the discovery of the top quark in 1995. One of the two teams (the D0 group) is led by Stony Brook Professor Paul Grannis.
The picture above displays a top quark candidate event with an electron (the large magenta arrow), a muon (green tube), two jets of many particles (gray and pink arrows), and the missing transverse momentum carried by neutrinos (large light arrow). The arrow widths are proportional to the energy carried by the object. The lattice work shows the cells of the calorimeter showing significant energy deposit. The spheres represent the amount of energy deposited in the calorimeter cells (orange and white for the electromagnet deposits and blue for hadronic deposits). The faint shadings represent the edges of the sub-detectors.
For more information on the top quark, see the High Energy Group WWW page.
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