The uninitiated would have had difficulty explaining the excited crowd of physicists filling Fermilab's auditorium on 26 April—especially since the presenters were careful to disclaim an actual discovery. Yet even though skepticism remained the watchword, the excitement of even the most ardent critics was palpable. The multinational 440‐member Collider Detector Facility group at Fermilab's Tevatron may have glimpsed the top quark—the longsought partner of the bottom quark—at This would make the t quark the heaviest fundamental particle yet seen. Indeed, because the observed mass is so close to the mass at which electroweak unification becomes manifest, many speculate that the top quark may hold the secrets to the primordial breaking of vacuum symmetry that is thought to have given masses to elementary particles.
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May 1994
