BABAR
| Organization: |
Stanford University |
| Location: |
SLAC (California) |
| Experiment duration: |
22 October 1999 - 7 April 2008 |
| Number of runs: |
7 |
| Total integrated luminosity (fb−1) |
530.82 |
| Website: |
BABAR Experiment Website |
OVERVIEW
The BaBar experiment is an international effort of more than 500 physicists and engineers studying the microscopic world at an approximate energy of about ten times the rest mass of a proton (~10 GeV). Its goal is the study of CP violation, and it is located at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is operated by Stanford University for the Department of Energy in California.[+]
While matter and antimatter were produced in equal quantities during the so-called “hot Big Bang phase”, today only matter remains, with antimatter being produced in trace quantities only in highly energetic astrophysical processes. Therefore, antimatter vanished from the Universe by means of an unknown mechanism, and high energy physicists are looking into possible explanations of this phenomenon. One way or another, it is necessary for particles to interact in such a way that CP-symmetry is not conserved, for the “baryon asymmetry” of the Universe to have come to be. CP violation was already predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics and the BaBar experiment has increased the accuracy to which this effect has been experimentally measured.
The BaBar detector is a multilayer particle detector with a large solid angle coverage, and it also allowed for studies of other phenomena to be carried out in the same detector. BaBar ceased operation on 7 April 2008, but data analysis is ongoing. In May 2012 BaBar reported that their recently analyzed data may suggest possible flaws in the Standard Model. While the level of certainty of the results is not enough to claim a break from the Standard Model, the results have the potential to impact existing theories of particle physics.
