DZero experiment

The DØ experiment consists of a worldwide collaboration of scientists conducting research on the fundamental nature of matter. The experiment is located at the world's highest-energy accelerator, the Tevatron Collider, at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, USA. The research is focused on precise studies of interactions of protons and antiprotons at the highest available energies. It involves an intense search for subatomic clues that reveal the character of the building blocks of the universe.

Overview

The DØ experiment is located at one of the interaction regions, where proton and antiproton beams intersect, on the Tevatron synchrotron ring, labelled 'DØ'.

The experiment is a test of the Standard Model of particle physics. It is sensitive in a general way to the effects of high energy collisions and so is meant to be a highly model independent probe of the theory. This is accomplished by constructing and upgrading a large volume elementary particle detector.

The detector is designed to stop as many as possible of the subatomic particles created from energy released by colliding proton/antiproton beams. The intersection region where the matter-antimatter annihilation takes place is close to the geometric center of the detector. The beam collision area is surrounded by tracking chambers in a strong magnetic field parallel to the direction of the beam(s). Outside the tracking chamber are the pre-shower detectors and the calorimeter. The Muon Chambers form the last layer in the detector. The whole detector is encased in concrete blocks which act as radiation shields.

Physics Reach

New Phenomena

From [http://www.fnal.gov/pub/presspass/press_releases/Dzero_baryon.html a press release] dated June 13, 2007:

Physicists of the DZero experiment at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have discovered a new heavy particle, the Ξb (pronounced "zigh sub b") baryon, with a mass of 5.774±0.019 GeV/c2, approximately six times the proton mass. The newly discovered electrically charged Ξb baryon, also known as the "cascade b," is made of a down, a strange and a bottom quark. It is the first observed baryon formed of quarks from all three families of matter. Its discovery and the measurement of its mass provide new understanding of how the strong nuclear force acts upon the quarks, the basic building blocks of matter.

Higgs

Top Quark

*DZero's [http://www-d0.fnal.gov/Run2Physics/top top-quark physics group's home page]

B Mesons

The W and Z Bosons

The strong force ( QCD )

Detector

Silicon Microstrip Tracker

The point where the beams collide is surrounded by "tracking detectors" to record the tracks (trajectories) of the high energy particles produced in the collision. The measurements closest to the collision are made using silicon detectors. These are flat wafers of silicon chip material. They give very precise information, but they are expensive, so we concentrate them closest to the beam where they don't have to cover so much area. The information from the silicon detector can be used to identify b-quarks (like the ones produced from the decay of a Higgs particle).

Central Fiber Tracker

Outside the silicon, D0 has an outer tracker made using scintillating fibers, which produce photons of light when a particle passes through. The whole tracker is immersed in a powerful magnetic field so the particle tracks are curved; from the curvature we can deduce their momentum.

EM Pre-Shower Detectors

Calorimeter

Outside the tracker is a dense absorber to capture particles and measure their energies. This is called a calorimeter. It uses uranium metal bathed in liquefied argon; the uranium causes particles to interact and lose energy, and the argon detects the interactions and gives an electrical signal that we can measure.

Muon Detector

The outermost layer of the detector detects muons. Muons are unstable particles but they live long enough to leave the detector. High energy muons are quite rare and a good sign of interesting collisions. Unlike most common particles they don't get absorbed in the calorimeter so by putting particle detectors outside it, we can identify muons. Because the muon system has to surround all of the rest of the detector, it ends up being very large, and it is the first thing that you see when looking at D0.

Trigger and DAQ

Proton-antiproton collisions happen inside the detector 2.5 million times every second. Not all those events can be recorded; at most, perhaps 20 events per second can be stored on computer tape. The trigger is the system of fast electronics and computers than has to decide, in real time, whether an event is interesting enough to be worth keeping.

The Front Ends

Level One Trigger

Level Two Trigger

Level Three Trigger

Offline Data Analysis

Reconstruction

Display

External links

* [http://www-d0.fnal.gov The DØ Experiment]