Andrew Ivanov
University of California-Davis and Fermilab
Thursday, January 15, 2009
4:00 p.m.
Cardwell 102
The Truth the Top Quark is Hiding
Of all the known fundamental building blocks of Nature the top quark is by far the heaviest particle. At this current moment top quarks are being produced copiously in a single place on Earth: the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) near Chicago, and the properties of the top quark are being measured with increasing precision. Due to its large mass the final products of top quark decays are very energetic, similar to those from decays of new exotic particles that we hope to discover. Intriguingly, some of such exotic phenomena can have the same experimental event signatures, barely distinguishable from top. I will present recent results from CDF (Collider Detector at Fermilab) experiment on searches for new physics processes, such as production of 4-th generation, super-symmetric and exotic mirror quarks, that could mimic top quark event signatures and have masses accessible at the Tevatron energies.