Collider Detector at Fermilab
CDF is an international collaboration that, at its peak, consisted of about 600 physicists[1] (from about 30 American universities and National laboratories and about 30 groups from universities and national laboratories from Italy, Japan, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, Russia, Finland, France, Taiwan, Korea, and Switzerland).
The goal of the experiment is to measure exceptional events out of the billions of particle collisions in order to: The Tevatron collided protons and antiprotons at a center-of-mass energy of about 2 TeV.
The very high energy available for these collisions made it possible to produce heavy particles such as the top quark and the W and Z bosons, which weigh much more than a proton (or antiproton).
[4] The CDF apparatus recorded the trajectories and energies of electrons, photons and light hadrons.
[5] There is another experiment similar to CDF called DØ which had a detector located at another point on the Tevatron ring.
CDF's origins trace back to 1976, when Fermilab established the Colliding Beams Department under the leadership of Jim Cronin.
This department focused on the development of both the accelerator that would produce colliding particle beams and the detector that would analyze those collisions.
In 1980, Roy Schwitters became associate head of CDF and KEK in Japan and the National Laboratory of Frascati in Italy joined the collaboration.
The collaboration completed a conceptual design report for CDF in the summer of 1981, and construction on the collision hall began on July 1, 1982.
[8] Run II included upgrades on the central tracking system, preshower detectors and extension on muon coverage.
The Standard Model, the most widely accepted theory describing particles and their interactions, predicted the existence of three generations of quarks.
[14] Only Fermilab's Tevatron had the energy capability to produce and detect top anti-top pairs.
Therefore, CDF worked to reconstruct top events, looking specifically for evidence of bottom quarks, W bosons neutrinos.
[15] On February 24, CDF and DØ experimenters simultaneously submitted papers to Physical Review Letters describing the observation of the top quark.
The two collaborations announced the discovery publicly at a seminar at Fermilab on March 2 and the papers were published on April 3.
[18] On January 8, 2007, the CDF collaboration announced that they had achieved the world's most precise measurement by a single experiment of the mass of the W boson.
[21] In 2023, the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider released an improved measurement for the mass of the W boson, 80,360 ± 16 MeV, which aligned with predictions from the Standard Model.
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.
Silicon is often used in charged particle detectors because of its high sensitivity, allowing for high-resolution vertex and tracking.
Sense wires are thinner and attract the electrons that are released by the argon gas as it is ionized.
The purpose of the solenoid is to bend the trajectory of charged particles in the COT and silicon detector by creating a magnetic field parallel to the beam.
These high-energy particles hardly interact so the muon detectors are strategically placed at the farthest layer from the beam pipe behind large walls of steel.
There are four layers of planar drift chambers, each with the capability of detecting muons with a transverse momentum pT > 1.4 GeV/c.
