This award will provide support to a group from Johns Hopkins University for a research program on the physics of elementary particles. The research will be conducted at the Tevatron proton antiproton collider at Fermilab, CDF. The primary responsibility of the group will be to work on the upgrade of the vertex detector at CDF using silicon strips for high precision tracking of the particles. The aim is to be able to tag B mesons and study their properties and to pursue the search for the existence of the top quark. The use of silicon strip detectors will also serve as test for their future use at very high energy and high luminosity colliders like the SSC.