Halloween Event By Sherri Smith and Dante Amidei
Woven of cotton, rayon, gold guimpe, and an unidentified synthetic, this weaving depicts an event in a collider in which two top quarks decay into anti leptons.

Some of the inspiration for both the materials used and the design came when Dan was showing Sherri images. In response to her question about the nature of the blurry images, Dan explained that the particles were detected by thousands of gold wires, and that the blurry images were tracks of particles of too low energy to be interesting.

Sherri Smith is a professor at the School of Art and Design working with textiles. A practicing artist for over 30 years her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Contemporary Crafts Museum in New York, and the Centre International de la Tapisserie in Switzerland, among many other venues.

Dan Amidei grew up in Chicago, got a BS from MIT in 1978 and a PhD in elementary particle physics from Berkeley in 1984. Since 1984, he has worked in the CDF collaboration, first as a postdoc at the University of Chicago, then as a Scientist at Fermilab, and now as a Professor at Michigan. CDF is a large general purpose detector to record the results of proton-antiproton collisions at 2.0 TeV, in the Fermilab Tevatron. These are the highest energy particle collisions achieved to date in the laboratory, probing distance scales 10,000 times smaller than the nucleus and recreating conditions that existed a fraction of a second after the Big Bang. Phenomena at these scales are part of the ultimate building blocks of the world, and the mathematical description of these phenomena has the elegance and symmetry of art, as appropriate for a description of the Fundamentals. Dan lives with his family in Ann Arbor, and commutes regularly to the experimental site at Fermilab.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]