PLUTO detector
PLUTO was a detector for experimental high-energy particle physics at the German national laboratory DESY in Hamburg. It was operated from 1974 to 1978 at the DORIS synchrotron and was substantially upgraded between 1977 and 1978 for operation at the PETRA accelerator, where it took data until 1979.
Detector
PLUTO used the first electromagnetic superconductive solenoid in the world, with a very uniform axial magnetic field of 1.2 tesla, to operate in a straight section of electron–positron accelerators at DESY, first with DORIS I in 1974–1976, then with DORIS II in 1978 and later with PETRA in 1978–1982.Experimental results
The PLUTO collaboration started with about 35 physicists from institutes of Aachen, DESY, Hamburg, Wuppertal and Siegen in Germany and subsequently gained new members from universities in the US, UK, Italy and Israel. The collaboration investigated electron–positron physics in a wide range of partly unexplored energies, contributed to new physics by exploring the just discovered charm quark and tau lepton, added important knowledge to electroweak and strong interactions and discovered new phenomena, by demonstrating that:- the Y is a very narrow bottom–antibottom new quark resonance,
- the Y decays hadronically mostly into three gluons,
- gluons are fragmenting and hadronizing into jets, seen as the three jets in the Y hadronic decays,
- gluons have spin 1,
- gluon bremsstrahlung exists.
A "Special High Energy and Particle Physics Prize" of the European Physical Society was awarded in 1995 to the PLUTO, TASSO, MARK-J and JADE collaborations for ''"establishing the existence of the gluon in independent and simultaneous ways"''