Washington, March 20 : An international team of scientists has come a step closer to understanding the Universe with the discovery of a fundamental building block of nature.

The recent discovery of a single top quark at the U. S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago is a major breakthrough in understanding matter and energy.

“The discovery of single top quark production fills in a major piece of the puzzle in particle physics and solidifies our understanding of the basic components of matter,” said MSU (Michigan State University) assistant physics professor Reinhard Schwienhorst.

Quarks are believed the smallest bits of matter and interact to form particles such as protons. Before, top quarks were only known to be produced in pairs.

By producing a single top quark, scientists have recorded the most massive of elementary particles and perhaps have paved the way for discovery of the Higgs boson.

Sometimes referred to as the “God Particle,” the Higgs boson is the theoretical building block of the Standard Model of the universe and could explain how massless elementary particles acquire mass.

“The discovery of a single top quark production marks a milestone in physics,” said Schwienhorst.

“We anticipate upcoming research at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe to take these findings to the next step and either evolve our understanding of particle physics or overturn the model completely,” he added. (ANI)