The Experiment Road to the Heavier Quarks and Other Heavy Objects

TL;DR

This paper reviews the history, discovery, and physics of heavy quarks—charm, bottom, and top—highlighting experimental techniques, key findings, and open issues, with a focus on charm quark studies and future physics prospects.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of heavy quark physics, emphasizing the development of techniques and lessons learned, especially from charm quark studies, and discusses future physics signals.

Findings

Charm quark studies pioneered key techniques.

Patterns in heavy quark production and decay elucidate underlying physics.

Open issues remain in understanding heavy quark dynamics.

Abstract

After a brief history of heavy quarks, I will discuss charm, bottom, and top quarks in turn. For each one, I discuss its first observation, and then what we have learned about production, hadronization, and decays - and what these have taught us about the underlying physics. I will also point out remaining open issues. For this series of lectures, the charm quark will be emphasized. It is the first of the heavy quarks, and its study is where many of the techniques and issues first appeared. Only very brief mention is made of CP violation in the bottom-quark system since that topic is the subject of a separate series of lectures by Gabriel Lopez. As the three quarks are reviewed, a pattern of techniques and lessons emerges. These are identified, and then briefly considered in the context of anticipated physics signals of the future; e.g., for Higgs and SUSY particles.