- Belle experiment
The Belle experiment is a
particle physics experiment conducted by the Belle Collaboration, an international collaboration of more than 400 physicists and engineers investigating CP-violation effects at the "High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation (KEK )" inTsukuba ,Ibaraki Prefecture ,Japan .The Belle detector, located at the collision point of the experiment, is a multi-layer particle detector. Its large solid angle coverage, vertex location with precision on the order of tens of micrometres (provided by a silicon vertex detector), good pion-kaon separation at multi-GeV momenta (provided by a novel Cherenkov detector), and few-percent precision electromagnetic calorimetry (CsI(Tl) scintillating crystals) allow for many other scientific searches apart from CP-violation. Extensive studies of rare decays, searches for exotic particles and precision measurements of bottom and charm mesons and
tau lepton have been carried out and have resulted in over 200 publications in physics journals.Highlights of the Belle experiment so far include the 1st observation of CP violation outside of the kaon system (2001),observation of;B o K^* l^+ l^- andb o s l^+ l^-; measurement ofphi_3 using theB o D K, D o K_S pi^+ pi^- Dalitz plot; measurement of the CKM quark mixing matrix elementsV_{ub}| and V_{cb}|;observation of direct CP violation in B^0 o pi^+ pi^- and B^0 o K^- pi^+; observation ofb o d transitions; evidence forB o au u and observations of a number of new particles including the
X(3872) .The Belle experiment operates at the KEKB accelerator, the world's highest luminosity machine. The instantaneous luminosity exceeds 1.7 imes 10^{34}/cm^2/sec. The integrated luminosity is greater than 700~ fb^{-1} (in excess of 600 million B ar B meson pairs). Most data is recorded on the Upsilon(4S)resonance, which decays to pairs of B mesons (particles containingb-quarks). About 10% of the data is recorded below the Upsilon(4S)resonance in order to study backgrounds. In addition, Belle has carriedout special short runs at the Upsilon(5S) resonance to study B_s mesons (particles with a b quark and s anti-quark) as well as onthe Upsilon(3S) resonance to search for evidence of
Dark Matter and theHiggs Boson .Plans for a Super B-factory, an upgraded facility with two orders of magnitude more luminosity are now under discussion.
ee also
*
B-Factory
*B-Bbar oscillation External links
* [http://belle.kek.jp Official Belle Website]
Wikimedia Foundation. 2010.