On 23 September 2021 at 8pm CEST, Dr. Maria Moreno Llácer will give a live public talk on the ATLAS Youtube Channel on the top quark. She will explain what makes this quark such a unique particle and describe the role it plays in the search for new physics.

The top quark is unique among the known quarks. It is the heaviest-known fundamental particle and decays before forming bound states. It interacts with the four fundamental forces of nature and three of them are mediated by intermediate particles, known as gauge bosons. Given its size, it strongly interacts with the Higgs boson and is predicted to have strong interactions with hypothetical new particles.

Although top quarks don't play a role in everyday life, they can be produced in accelerators. Indeed, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is a “top factory” – hundreds of millions of top quarks have been produced at the LHC and are being analysed by ATLAS scientists. Measuring the properties of the top quark, like its mass and interactions with other particles, is one of priorities of the ATLAS physics programme. It provides crucial input to the Standard Model and insight to searches for new physics processes.

Dr. María Moreno Llácer is a senior researcher working at the Instituto de Física Corpuscular, a joint centre of the University of Valencia and the Spanish Research Council (CSIC), Spain. She has been a member of the ATLAS Experiment since 2007. Her research focuses on studying two of the most special elementary particles of the Standard Model: the Higgs boson and the top quark. Understanding the interaction of these two particles among themselves and with the others, as well as precise measurements of their properties and searches for "new physics", are the main objectives of her research. She has also contributed to data taking at the control room, the commissioning of the detector, and upgrades and developments for the future LHC runs.

This event is part of a series of ATLAS Live Public Talks held on YouTube. You can watch more in the dedicated YouTube playlist.