BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO THE CDF EXPERIMENT

version 0.95, John Yoh, 4/20/05

The CDF (Collider Detector experiment at Fermilab) is an international collaboration of about 500 Physicists (from about 30 American universities and National laboratories, etc, plus also from about 30 groups from universities and national laboratories from Italy, Japan, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, Russia, Finland, France, Taiwan, Korea, Switzerland, etc.). We have built the 100-ton CDF detector (about 40' high by 40' x 40' base at the Fermilab Tevatron collider (colliding High energy-- approximately 1000 Gev or 1 TeV--protons with anti-protons) with the goal of measuring exceptional events out of the billions of collisions to

Look for the production of New Physics
Measure and study the production and decay of heavy particles such as the Top and Bottom Quarks, and the W and Z bosons.
Measure and study the production of High Energy jets and photons
Other studies such as diffraction, etc.

HIGH ENERGY PROTONS AND ANTIPROTONS COLLISIONS--The tevatron collider, currently the highest energy collider in the world, studies the collision of 1000 GeV protons with 1000 GeV anti-protons. As you may know, Einstein's special relativity says that as a particle gets more energetic, it gets more massive (somewhat related to the famous E = M C Squared formula). The Tevatron is an accelerator which uses alternating electric current (in special RF Cavities) to speed up the protons (and antiprotons--afterwards, I will use the word protons to mean both protons and antiprotons) to within a small fraction of the speed of light, thus making these energetic protons having a mass that is more than 1000 times the mass of a proton at rest !!!! The Magnets around the circular Tevatron bends the protons into a 4 miles circumferance ring thus enabling the RF cavities to repeatedly speed up the protons. Once the Proton reaches the energy of about 1000 GeV (G mean Giga of 10**9, and T means Teva 10**12), the magnet in the ring makes the beam of protons collide with the beam of antiprotons and continue for up to 30 hours, until the proton beams are dissipated.
Please see the associated web pages which follows up on things discussed in this web page---
(Optional) To follow up, here's a short review of what is the current status of High Energy Physics theory--
The Standard Model for High Energy Physics
(Optional)--Next, we describe a little about Doing High Energy Experiments , the typical timeline of a High Energy Physics experiment, How many of us become Physicists, and some issues of how we do Physics analysis.
Next, we provide here
an introduction to the Physic processes being studied by the CDF experiment
Now, we start to describe our experiment--see
an introduction to the CDF Detector along with short descriptions of the particles we measure, how are they distinguished from each other, and how we reconstruct the event and do the analysis to obtain a physics result.
Here's a short
introduction to the CDF Event Displays, a tool we use to help us understand the events, and also provide a visual view of what is happening in interesting events.
Finally, we provide here some further topics that might be of interest,--
additional comments on the CDF experiment --including the Top and Bottom discovery, a note on signal vs. background, and other topics.