The discovery of the Top quark was the subject of a lunchtime lecture at the M-Shop, Wednesday.

“The Top quark was discovered on March 2 at Fermi National Lab. It was a genuine scientific discovery in which [ISU researchers] played an important role,” said John Hauptman, an associate professor of physics at Iowa State.

Six kinds of quarks and six kinds of leptons make up all matter, Hauptman said. Scientists believe the quark is the smallest piece of matter in existence.

“If you take the nucleus of an atom and blow it up 10,000 times, you will see a proton. A proton is really a region of space that has three quarks in it,” he said.

The three quarks are 1/1,000 the size of a proton, Hauptman said.

After the first two quarks in nature were discovered, others followed. The other quarks, however, were created artificially, he said.

The remaining quarks, in addition to the Up and Down quarks, are “Strange,” “Charmed,” “Bottom” and the newly discovered “Top” quark.

The Top and Bottom quarks were discovered at the Fermi Lab, which is outside of Chicago.

At the Fermi Lab is an accelerator measuring four miles around. It cost $1 billion to build and is the highest energy machine in the world, Hauptman said.

“It consists of four miles of superconductor magnets. The protons go around clockwise and produce anti-protons,” he said.

The anti-matter is collected and shot back through the accelerator counterclockwise, he said. It then collides head-on with the circulating protons, he said.

“This process is run 24 hours a day, year-round. This produces one top quark per month,” Hauptman said.

“Out of 30 million events collected over the last three years, only 11 top quarks have been detected,” he said.

Over the centuries, there have been several times people thought they knew it all, said Hauptman. So, it is always a good idea to look beyond the six quarks already known to search for others, he said.