Layer 1: The Beam Pipe
The beam pipe is the innermost layer of CDF. The beam pipe is where the protons and anti-protons, traveling at approximately .99996c, collide head on. Each of the protons is moving extremely close to the speed of light with extremely high energies. Therefore, in a collision, much of the energy is converted into mass. This allows proton- anti-proton annihilation to produce daughter particles, such as top quarks with a mass of 175 GeV, much heavier than the original protons.
Read more about this topic: Collider Detector At Fermilab
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