Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:My PHD dissertation was on the half life of charmed particles.
Omg I would love to hear about that. - NASA PP
We smashed proton beams against a fixed target made of diamond, which created short lived particles (charmed quarks and lighter quarks for that experiment, to be specific). We had a basketball sized room with arrays of detectors recording the various particles resulting from the decay of the short lived particles, including muons (I built and took care of the muon wall LOL). We reconstructed the vertices of the decays, filtered the charmed quarks out. I measured its lifetime based on the decay vertices. It was an experiment involving more than a hundred people and I was just a graduate student in that group.
As far as high energy physics goes, that was a tiny experiment. The ones you hear on the news are all huge colliding experiments (proton beam smashes against proton beam for higher energy to generate even heavier quarks, Higgs bosons... ), involving 500+ people.
Thanks for asking. It was fun to remember. I am just a middle aged mom working on computer now.