Discover More: Research team measures the mass of the top quark with unparalleled accuracy

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Research team measures 
the mass of the 
top quark with 
unparalleled accuracy

Date Posted: 21st April 2022





As we already know, the top quark, being a part of the third generation, is the heaviest particle of all quarks as the Higgs charge determines how strongly a particle engages with the Higgs field, or how strongly it couples with the Higgs boson and top quarks have the highest Higgs charge among all the fundamental particles.

The CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid is a general-purpose detector at the LHC) collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has performed the most accurate ever measurement of the mass of the top quark. 

Knowing this allows testing of the internal consistency of the mathematical description of all elementary particles, the Standard Model.

Our knowledge of the stability of the universe depends on our combined knowledge of the Higgs Boson and the top quark masses. We only know that the universe is very close to a metastable state with the current measurements of the top quark mass. If the top quark was even a little different, the universe would be less stable, probably eventually disappearing in an event similar to the Big Bang.

Metastable state - In quantum field theory, a false vacuum is a hypothetical vacuum that is stable, but not in the most stable state possible (it is metastable). It is a situation that is stable for now but could quickly deteriorate if something were to go wrong.

As for why the stability of our universe depends on the Higgs boson and the top quark, I would recommend you to read the following discussion:


The CMS team measured 5 different properties of collision events in which the top quarks were produced (earlier, 3 were measured), using data from proton-proton LHC collisions collected by CMS detector in 2016. Further, an in-depth understanding of remaining uncertainties and interdependencies was carried out. The top quark mass was estimated to be 171.77+0.38 GeV, which is consistent with the previous predictions from the Standard Model.

Source: CERN

Read More: https://phys.org/news/2022-04-team-mass-quark-unparalleled-accuracy.html

Citation:

staff, S. X. (2022, April 19). Research team measures the mass of the top quark with unparalleled accuracy. Phys.org; Phys.org. https://phys.org/news/2022-04-team-mass-quark-unparalleled-accuracy.html

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