This picture is a rendering (courtesy Michael Goodman and Scientific American) of a proton-antiproton collision that produces a top quark (red) and an anti-top quark (blue). Each top quark subsequently decays into a W boson and a bottom quark. The W bosons then decay into quarks (u,d in the upper part of the figure) or a charged lepton and a neutrino (lower part of the figure). The quarks aren't observed as free particles, but instead dress themselves up with other quarks (that are pulled from the vacuum in a process called fragmentation) and are observed in the detector as jets of charged particles.

We discivered the top quark at the CDF experiment at Fermilab. Fermilab in 1994-95 and have just begun to study it in detail. It's incredibly massive for a (supposedly) elementary particle. Its mass is about the same as the mass of an atom of gold, but gold is made up of nearly 200 protons and neutrons, whereas the top quark isn't made up of anything else (as far as we know). We really know very little about why the fundamental particles have the masses that they do.  We hope that studying one that is so extraordinarly in this way may teach us something really new. Currently I am working on the ATLAS experiment at CERN, in Switzerland, where we are just about to start taking data in early 2010 at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV - 3.5 times the energy of the Fermilab collider. Ultimately the LHC accelerator at CERN will go up to 14 TeV! At these energies top quarks are copiously produced, and I'm excited about having HUGE samples to study.

At energies as high as the LHC the discovery potential is enormous - dark matter, extra dimensions, super symmetry, and of course the Higgs boson. So while I'll be studying top quarks in the early data, there's lots of other exciting work to do as well.