Brenna and Tom

In marriage, a ring symbolizes commitment and love. But in the married lives of physicists Brenna Flaugher '83 and Tom Diehl '82, a ring also symbolizes a professional competition. Every day, Flaugher and Diehl work on competing research projects at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, located in Batavia, Ill., about 35 miles west of Chicago. Their job: to discover and categorize the smallest bits of matter in the subatomic world.

For Flaugher, Diehl, and hundreds of other Fermilab physicists, the "other" ring in their lives is Fermilab's huge particle accelerator, a four-mile-circumference circle buried in the middle of the Illinois prairie.

Within this particle accelerator, protons and antiprotons, each 100,000 times smaller than an atom, zoom around at near the speed of light. When they collide - every 3.9 microseconds - the result is a burst of even smaller secondary particles. At Fermilab, two massive collider detectors - each the size of a three-story house and weighing about 2,500 tons - help physicists analyze the particle collisions. With painstaking analysis, the physicists probe basic questions about the very nature of matter: What are the smallest, most indivisible building blocks of matter? Are they, as thought, quarks and leptons? Or are even these particles made up of something even smaller?

The two Fermilab detectors, known as CDF and D-Zero, are backed up by two competing teams of physicists. Flaugher works with CDF, while Diehl works with D-Zero. With the two teams in direct competition, no collaboration is permitted and a veil of confidentiality shrouds all experiment results prior to peer review and publication. That means no pillow talk, either. "We never exchange information," said Flaugher. "The main place you hear rumors is in the cafeteria. Some people just love to talk."

With CDF (which stands for Collider Detector at Fermilab), Flaugher studies the quark paths, or "jets," produced when protons and antiprotons collide. Meanwhile, about a mile away on the ring, Diehl studies collisions that produce pairs of W-bosons (particles which govern radioactive decay), Z-bosons, and photons.

In 1996, the CDF team made a startling announcement. New data suggested that quarks might not be the fundamental constituents of matter after all. As the popular press caught wind of the news, which had the potential to change long-held theories of how matter is organized, Fermilab asked Flaugher to help field reporters' questions. She was quoted in The New York Times and Washington Post, explaining why CDF came to question whether the quark is indeed the smallest particle.

Apparently, she explained, some proton-antiproton collisions had resulted in quark jets that were inconsistent with the so-called Standard Model, the theoretical picture that describes how elementary particles are organized and how they should interact with one another. One remote possibility, which would have made a shambles of the Standard Model, was that the quarks were breaking into smaller components. (A much more likely explanation, said Flaugher, is that the Standard Model itself needs tweaking to explain the unusual new data.) In general, said Flaugher, she's dismayed by the way the media treats science news. "The public needs to feel comfortable with science, but if you listen to TV or radio, there's such an emphasis on how science is too hard to understand," she said. "The media treats science as too difficult and people as too stupid."

With all the attention on CDF instead of D-Zero, and with Flaugher getting her 15 minutes of fame, was Diehl a tad jealous? "He didn't mind me being quoted in The New York Times or Washington Post," Flaugher joked, "but when Bates called me, that made him jealous."

Flaugher and Diehl, who earned their doctorates at Rutgers, met at Bates. Both say the Bates physics department trained them well for their careers. "Mark Semon taught me the beauty of physics and math," said Diehl. "George Ruff never failed to remind us that physics is fun, and Gene Clough was always there: he worked forever and taught me dedication. It is a special department." Diehl's adviser was Eric Wollman. "Eric taught me skepticism," Diehl said. "Skepticism plays a big role in what we do. It's the nature of experimental science - you challenge what people say, make them prove it. Here, immediate hope is combined with skepticism. Our papers might be just six pages, yet every sentence is studied and criticized carefully by 400 to 500 people." Flaugher, who did her thesis with Jack Pribram, echoed her husband's thoughts about the Bates physics faculty. "They were always so worried about us, which is such a different atmosphere than graduate school, where if you don't understand something, it's your fault."