SLAC Today logo

BaBar Delivers for Winter and Spring Conferences

(Image - BaBar Collaboration) BaBar collaborators are hard at work preparing a new round of the latest physics results for the winter conferences. All told some 50 new papers have been produced or are in the final stages of review.

The "season" started in Aspen in mid-February, includes three major European conferences, and concludes in mid-April in Vancouver at the Flavor Physics and CP Violation conference.

BaBar's main mission is CP violation in B meson decays—responsible for differences in the decays of matter versus antimatter. The B-Factory program is much richer, though, with BaBar serving as an excellent factory for other particles as well: charm mesons, tau leptons, and charmonium mesons.

Most of the new papers focus on properties of the rare B decays as well as the wider spectrum of charm and tau physics, rather than CP violation. The Collaboration has already presented CP violation results with accumulated data through the end of the last experimental run, and will release updated results once sufficient new data have been collected.

Among the large multitude of results, BaBarians have observed new charm and charmonium states, and hints that these new states do not fit within the conventional view of the strong interaction that holds quarks together into particles. They have measured the decay constant of the Ds particle with the world's best accuracy. They have also studied the properties of rare B decays that allow a significant reduction in the uncertainty on the Standard Model predictions for CP violation in certain decay modes. This last result might become critical in the future as BaBar continues to search for evidence of new physics deviations from the Standard Model in these processes.

—Heather Rock Woods
   SLAC Today, March 23, 2006