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Author Topic: LEGO top quark accelerator  (Read 1678 times)

Jeremy McCreary

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LEGO top quark accelerator
« on: July 14, 2016, 03:30:49 AM »

A different kind of fun with tops...

What can you make with a nacho bowl, a powerful pull-back top spinner, an 8L axle, and the right LEGO tire and wheel?

What else? A DIY single top quark accelerator! Ah, the sweet whirr of a lone top quark on the fly!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JaKIsoHCUw

At the heart of this high-energy accelerator is the reversible white and dark gray Revatron, based on the latest and most powerful LEGO pull-back motor. The Revatron's ability to send top quarks around the ring in either direction will be the basis for a much-anticipated top quark collider.



The top quark was predicted by Kobayashi and Maskawa in 1973 and first observed by Fermilab researchers in 1995. It's ~39% heavier than the famed Higgs boson and ~40 times more massive than any other elementary particle. It's a transient condensation of matter in very high-energy elementary particle interactions and not a constituent of ordinary matter.



Importantly, the top is the only quark known to exist singly -- i.e., outside the confines of a hadron like the proton or neutron. Otherwise, a top quark accelerator would be just plain silly!

Photos and write-up coming soon @ http://www.moc-pages.com/home.php/99234
See also: Reversible flying LEGO® rotor launcher @ http://www.moc-pages.com/moc.php/418125
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