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Physics from BaBar at ICHEP08

(Image - ICHEP08 poster)The major summer conference for particle physics, the 2008 International Conference on High Energy Physics, or ICHEP08, is currently underway in Philadelphia. There, hundreds of researchers from laboratories and universities around the world are spending this week and next discussing the most exciting high-energy physics results of the past year.

As in the past, the BaBar collaboration will have a great harvest of physics to present at the conference, including the first results from our final run. During this run the collaboration recorded data at the narrow Upsilon resonances and performed a precision scan of the energy region above our traditional energy point, the Upsilon (4S), all the way up to 11.2 GeV. This unique data set, which corresponds to 10 times more data than ever collected at these energies, opens a whole new avenue for quarkonium research, including observation of other members of the bottomonium system and the first study of hyperfine splittings in this system of particles.

The fact that the collaboration is in a position to present first results from the data recorded just this spring is also a testimony to the remarkable performance of BaBar’s computing team working at SLAC and the five Tier-A centers throughout the collaborating countries. "Running at the narrow Upsilon resonance after eight years at the Upsilon (4S) presented us with new challenges in data acquisition all the way through simulation. The team met them creatively and rapidly to make it possible to produce this physics," said Gregory Dubois-Felsmann of SLAC, who is the BaBar computing coordinator.

BaBar collaborators will present more than 90 results in 22 talks, including three plenary talks. A great number of these results are on measurements of CP violation in B meson decays and searches for new physics based on the full BaBar data set at the Upsilon(4S) resonance. "We will present our most precise measurement of the CP asymmetry, 'sin2beta,' the parameter that established CP violation in the B meson system," said Soeren Prell of Iowa State University, BaBar Physics Coordinator. In addition, this year's presentations will cover the new results from the data at the narrow Upsilon resonances and the scan above the Upsilon(4S). A highlight of the BaBar results at the conference will be the discovery of the bottomonium ground state, the ηb meson.

—Abolhassan Jawahery, BaBar spokesman

   SLAC Today, August 1, 2008