The BaBar Experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
Ever wonder where all the anti-matter in the universe is?
If so, you are not alone! Most scientists who study the early universe believe that all the matter and energy of the universe was created in the BIG BANG. And that just after the Big Bang, there should have been equal amounts of matter and anti-matter in the universe.. If this was the case, then what's happened to all the anti-matter since then?? Although we can easily make anti-matter at particle accelerators, it doesn't look like there is any stable antimatter hanging around in the universe. This imbalance of matter and anti-matter is one of the problems which will be addressed at the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
The SLAC PEP-II collider will accelerate high energy electrons and positrons in a storage ring, then force them to make head-on collisions with each other. The accelerator is shown below:
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The goal of the physics is to study "CP violation" or why there is a discrepancy of matter and anti-matter in the universe. It is possible that most of the matter and anti-matter in the early universe annihilated, leaving only a small excess of matter, which is the all the matter left in our universe. At the SLAC B factory, B mesons and their antiparticles, anti-B mesons will be produced. In the case of B mesons, they are prone to decay with CP violation, but only rarely. Since we expect less than 1 in 100,000 B mesons to exhibit this phenomenon of CP violation, we'll have to make a lot of them in order to study CP violation in any detail.
the silicon vertex detector for the BaBar experiment
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