• Question: @Kathryn what have you discovered so far about the top quark?

    Asked by anon-187262 to Kathryn on 7 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Kathryn Coldham

      Kathryn Coldham answered on 7 Nov 2018:

      Great question Zoe! I started my PhD about a month ago, so I haven’t contributed to a discovery…yet! Although, this summer, scientists working on the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN announced they discovered the top quark, anti-top quark (which has the same mass as the top quark but opposite charge) and the Higgs boson (a particle that gives other particles their masses) being made in the same physics process.

      The sciencey name for this process is “ttH production” and finding this process in the detector gives us more information about how the top quark interacts with the Higgs boson. Here’s a video about it if you’d like to find out more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTvmYmKZ2aY

      Feel free to ask anymore questions, happy to help you learn more! 🙂

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