UA1 experiment

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UA5
Underground Area 5
SppS pre-accelerators
PSProton Synchrotron
AAAntiproton Accumulator
The central section of the UA1 experiment on display at the Microcosm museum at CERN
Interior of the central section of the UA1 experiment on display at the Microcosm museum at CERN

The UA1 experiment (an abbreviation of Underground Area 1) was a

Rutherford Medal and Prize
from the Institute of Physics for their outstanding roles in the discovery of the W and Z particles.

It was named as the first experiment in a CERN "Underground Area" (UA), i.e. located underground, outside of the two main CERN sites, at an interaction point on the SPS accelerator, which had been modified to operate as a collider. The UA1 central detector was crucial to understanding the complex topology of proton-antiproton collisions. It played a most important role in identifying a handful of W and Z particles among billions of collisions.[1]

Museo nazionale della scienza e della tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci
of Milan

After the discovery of the W and Z boson, the UA1 collaboration went on to search for the

New York Times that evidence of the top quark "looks really good".[2] Over the next months it became clear that UA1 had overlooked a significant source of background.[3]
The top quark was ultimately discovered in 1994–1995 by physicists at Fermilab with a mass near 175 GeV.

The UA1 was a huge and complex detector for its day. It was designed as a general-purpose detector.[4] The detector was a 6-chamber cylindrical assembly 5.8 m long and 2.3 m in diameter, the largest imaging

charged particles. The electrons which were released drifted along an electric field shaped by field wires and were collected on sense wires. The geometrical arrangement of the 17000 field wires and 6125 sense wires allowed a spectacular 3-D interactive display of reconstructed physics events to be produced.[5]

The UA1 detector was conceived and designed in 1978/9, with the proposal submitted in mid-1978.[6]

Since the end of running, the magnet used in the UA1 experiment has been used for other high energy physics experiments, notably the NOMAD and T2K neutrino experiments.

See also

References

  1. ^ "ua1 central detector: Topics by WorldWideScience.org". Archived from the original on 2011-10-03.
  2. ^ Sullivan, Walter. "Physicists May Have Tracked Last Quark to Lair". The New York Times. No. 25 June 1984. Retrieved 23 June 2017.
  3. ^ Staley, Kent W. (2004). The Evidence for the Top Quark: Objectivity and Bias in Collaborative Experimentation. Cambridge University Press. p. 80.
  4. ^ "The UA1 detector - CERN Courier". Archived from the original on 2012-03-19.
  5. ^ "ua1 central detector: Topics by WorldWideScience.org". Archived from the original on 2011-10-03.
  6. ^ "When CERN saw the end of the alphabet". CERN Courier. 1 May 2003.

Further reading

External links

CERN-UA-01 experiment record on INSPIRE-HEP

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