John D. Reid

Research Interests

Thesis Experiment

Charmonium production from proton-antiproton annihilation.
High Energy Physics
My main field of research is experimental high energy physics. High energy physics is the study of the fundamental constituents of matter and how they interact. This field is also called elementary particle physics or fundamental particle physics. The reason the term "high energy" is used is that the smaller size one explores with experiments the more energy it takes. High energy physics studies matter in a way that is analogous to finding out what cars are made of by colliding them together. If two cars are going very slow and collide, they will probably just incur dents. If they go a little faster then maybe a mirror will break off. One can conclude that cars are made, in part, of mirrors. In a more energetic collision a wheel might come off or part of a bumper. At even higher energies you might start to see engine parts. The more energy that is used in a collision the more one can see the deeper structure of a car. To discover the structure of fundamental particles we collide them in particle accelerators ("atom smashers"). (A TV tube is a particle accelerator that accelerates electrons, which hit the front of the tube and light it up to form a picture.) Fundamental particles are too small to see with our eyes and other senses, so we must build detectors that are able to sense particles. Experimental high energy physicists design, build and and operate such detectors, and most importantly, analyze the data that is produced from the detectors.
E760 HomePage Thesis Experiment, 1987-1993
Charmonium Spectroscopy
Fermi National Laboratory, Chicago, Ill.

E760 (and later E835) is the number given to an experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL). This is a particle accelerator about an hour west of Chicago, Ill. The experiment was a high resolution energy spectroscopy of bound states of the charm and anit-charm quarks. The charm and anit-charm quark pairs were created by colliding protons and anti-protons together. These two particles will collide with many possibilities for the results of the collisions. Sometimes they annihilate and produce a variety of products. Whatever the result, such things as energy, momentum, charge, etc, must be conserved in the process. One of the possibilities is that a charm quark and an anit-charm quark are produced. These two particles will be bound together for some time (fractions of seconds) by the strong force, until they annihilate and decay into other particles. High resolution spectroscopy means the energy of the system was measured to a high precision. This allowed a detailed study of this quark/anti-quark pair. A detailed study was undertaken to better understand the nature of the strong force. My thesis studied another type of collision result - the production of particles that fall under the category of pseudoscalar mesons (Pseudoscaler refers to properties of the particles that are analgous to their angular momentum or spin. Meson means the particles consist of quark and anti-quark pairs.) Pseudoscaler production exhibits yet unxplained characteristics. This experiment provided more data to better understand pseudoscalar production and ultimately better understand the strong force.

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