More than 300 physicists from throughout the United States and the world involved in pioneering research will attend The D-Zero Workshop that will be held at California State University, Fresno from June7 to 12.

The physicists are members of The D-Zero Collaboration, an international physicists group that operates an experiment at one of the world’s most powerful particle accelerators, the D-Zero Detector.

The experiments performed with the detector produce elementary particles that were thought to have only existed in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, said Dr. Ray Hall, a Fresno State physics professor who is a collaboration member.

“This study of the particle collisions produced by the world’s most powerful accelerator may unlock fundamental questions in physics,” said Hall, who has been a member of D-Zero since 1988 and has contributed to the discovery of the 12th fundamental particle in 1995 named the “top quark.”

Fresno State is a collaborating institute of The D- Zero Collaboration, which started in 1985 and now has 700 university members from 18 nations. The week-long annual D-Zero Conference is traditionally hosted at one of its more than 74 collaborating institutes.

It’s occurrence in Fresno is significant for faculty, students and the community in general, Hall said.

“New discoveries will be discussed at the workshop which will add to the many findings that have already been published in prestigious journals such as Physical Review Letters and Physics Letters,” Hall said.

“It presents a unique opportunity for our physics students and faculty to experience frontier physics research and meet many experimental particle physicists from around the globe.”

The members also will discuss the previous year’s accomplishments and will set new initiatives and goals for the upcoming year during the conference, said Hall, whose physics students at Fresno State assist him in his research.

Under Hall’s guidance, the students analyze online data from the detector located at Fermi National Laboratory in Illinois.

Students also build components of the detector in the Physics Lab at McLane Hall, which are then shipped to Illinois, Hall said.

“This gives students a chance to apply technical s kill i n d igital e lectronics while I earning about particle physics,” Hall added.

Copy prepared by University Relations student intern Ravneet Padda