This picture is a rendering (courtesy Michael Goodman and Scientific American) of a proton-antiproton collision that produces a top quark (red) and an anti-top quark (blue). Each top quark subsequently decays into a W boson and a bottom quark. The W bosons then decay into quarks (u,d in the upper part of the figure) or a charged lepton and a neutrino (lower part of the figure). The quarks aren't observed as free particles, but instead dress themselves up with other quarks (that are pulled from the vacuum in a process called fragmentation) and are observed in the detector as jets of charged particles.

My research involves the study of events like this at the CDF experiment at Fermilab. Fermilab is the world's highest energy accelerator and the only one capable of creating top quarks. It's pretty cool stuff! We discovered the top quark in 1994-95 and have just begun to study it in detail. It's incredibly massive for a (supposedly) elementary particle. Its mass is about the same as the mass of an atom of gold, but gold is made up of nearly 200 protons and neutrons, whereas the top quark isn't made up of anything else (as far as we know). We really know very little about why the fundamental particles have the masses that they do.  We hope that studying one that is so extraordinarly in this way may teach us something really new.

In order to study it in enough detail, we need to take lots of data (because top quarks are produced very rarely, even at the energy frontier), and build the best detector we possibly can to measure everything that happens when top quarks are produced. So between 1996 and 2000 my colleagues and I built a major upgrade of the CDF detector. Meanwhile, the accelerator physicists at Fermilab upgraded the accelerator.   With the new improved dectector, and the new and improved accelerator, we will be collecting top quarks at about 20 times the rate we did before.  We are beginning to publish the first results based on about twice as much data as we had in 1995. We are still expecting about a factor of ten more data through 2009. The next few years are going to be very exciting!