Baylor Joins World's Largest Experimental Physics Collaborations
Baylor University (BU) has joined one of the world's largest experimental physics collaborations - the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) collaboration - at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago in Batavia, Ill.
The Waco, TX.-based Baptist institution is now among the 59 universities and labs from around the globe that work together at the federally funded laboratory "to advance understanding of the nature of matter and energy," said BU news release.
"We're delighted that Baylor is now among many prominent universities on CDF, a world-class high energy physics experiment at Fermilab. It's a tremendous milestone for our growing experimental high energy physics research program," said Dr. Jay Dittmann, assistant professor of physics at Baylor and the principal investigator in the experimental high energy physics group, which researches particle collisions.
"We are studying the building blocks of nature," said Dittmann. "The goal is to discover the identity and properties of the particles that make up the universe and to understand the interactions between those particles. In order to do that, we need powerful particle accelerators like the Tevatron at Fermilab."
Tevatron is the world's highest-energy particle accelerator that CDF uses to study collisions of the minute particles.
"The Tevatron works by accelerating protons and anti-protons to almost the speed of light and then colliding them. There's a tremendous amount of energy in each collision, producing a whole bunch of particles. We study the properties of these particles, and sometimes we even discover new ones," explained Dittmann, who received his Ph.D. in Physics from Duke University prior to joining BU faculty in 2003
In 1995, one new particle called the "top quark" was discovered at Fermilab. According to Dittmann, physicists are looking for the last undiscovered piece of the "Standard Model of Fundamental Particles and Interactions" - the "Higgs Boson" particle.
Dittmann contends detecting the signs of the particle at Fermilab will be a huge achievement for high energy physics.
