The B-Factory |
In 1999, the 'B-factory' at SLAC (the Stanford Linear Accelerator) opened for business. It achieves
extremely high energies by accelerating electrons and positrons (the electron's positive antiparticle)
in opposite directions, then causing them to collide with each other. At very high energies, some of these
collisions result in the production of electrically neutral B and anti-B particles
(written as 
and 
). A consists
of a down quark and an anti-bottom quark, while a contains a bottom quark and
an anti-down quark.
But why bother? |
This experiment is crucial to our understanding of the universe, as it could possibly provide an answer as to why there is so much matter and so little antimatter in the universe.
If, as physicists suspect, matter and antimatter were originally created in a 1:1 ratio,
it would all have annihilated long ago, and we wouldn't be here to speculate about it! It has been suggested
that the and particles will have different decay rates
(unlike other particle - antiparticle pairs, which decay symmetrically), which could have led to an initial
matter - antimatter asymmetry in the early universe, and the relative abundance of matter we see today.
But why BaBar? |
Why is the project called 
?
|
Well, is generally pronounced 'B bar', and someone decided that it
would be nice to have a cute little elephant as a logo!
|
(At this juncture, it has to be borne in mind that particle physicists will happily talk about 'Penguin decays inducing flavour-changing neutral currents', or 'naked red bottom quarks' without batting an eyelid, so the choice of name is not too surprising!)
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