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
Famous quotes containing the words layer, beam and/or pipe:
“This world is run by people who know how to do things. They know how things work. They are equipped. Up there, there’s a layer of people who run everything. But we—we’re just peasants. We don’t understand what’s going on, and we can’t do anything.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“What do we plant when we plant the tree?
We plant the ship that will cross the sea,
We plant the mast to carry the sails,
We plant the planks to withstand the gales—
The keel, the keelson, and beam and knee—
We plant the ship when we plant the tree.”
—Henry Abbey (1842–1911)
“If you love music, hear it; go to operas, concerts and pay fiddlers to play to you; but I insist on your neither piping nor fiddling yourself. It puts a gentleman in a very frivolous, contemptible light.... Few things would mortify me more than to see you bearing a part in a concert, with a fiddle under your chin, or a pipe in your mouth.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)