The Top Quark Discovery

It was not until the 1990s that experiments gained the precision needed to estimate the mass of the top quark. In 1995, two experiments at the Fermilab confirmed the existence of the top quark and showed why it was so hard to find. The top quark has a incredible mass of 175 GeV/c², more than 30 times the mass of the bottom quark! It took so long to find it because physicists needed a more powerful accelerator to produce it.