PLUTO detector

Creation

PLUTO, constructed at DESY laboratories in Hamburg in 1973-1974 and substantially upgraded in 1977-1978, was an experimental detector for high energy particle physics. It was the first electromagnetic superconductive solenoid in the world, with a magnetic field of 12000 Gauss, to operate in a strait section of e⁺e⁻ accelerators at DESY, first with DORIS I (a storage ring at center of mass energies of ~3-5 GeV) in 1974-1976, then with DORIS II (the upgraded storage ring of DORIS I at center of mass energies of ~7-10 Gev) in 1978 and later with PETRA (also a storage ring, at larger center of mass energies of ~10-45 GeV) in 1979-1982 (see review ).

The experimental collaboration PLUTO, first with about 35 German physicists from Institutes of Aachen, DESY, Hamburg, Wuppertal and Siegen, enlarged subsequently by international colleagues from Universties in USA, Great Britain, Italy and Israel, investigated the e⁺e⁻ physics in a wide range of partly unexplored energies, contributed effectively to new physics by the exploration of the just discovered charm quark and tau lepton, added important knowledge to electroweak interactions (see review) and finally discovered new phenomena (see recollection ) by demonstrating that:

• the Y(9.46 GeV) was a very narrow bottom-antibottom new quark resonance (done together with an other second experiment)
• the Y is decaying mostly into 3 gluons
• the gluons are fragmenting and hadronizing into jets (almost like quarks)
• the gluon bremsstrahlung exists (done together with three more experiments),

all together leading to the discovery of the gluon and the gluon jets and the confirmation of the Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) theory of strong interactions.