What is the B factory for?
The B factory detector, BaBar, will be built by an international
collaboration. It will be built especially to create pairs of
electrically neutral B and anti-B mesons. The neutral B contains
an anti-b quark and a d quark while the neutral anti-B contains a b
quark and an anti-d.
Physicists will tune the two beams so that when they collide they will
have exactly enough energy to create these two mesons. Because the
electrons and positrons are circling different energies,
the B and anti-B mesons which are created will be moving very quickly
in the same direction. They both will travel in the same direction
that the faster moving electrons were. This will let physicists infer
how long they last before they decay by looking
at how far they get. If, as physicists expect, the B's and the anti-B's
decay to certain sets of particles at different rates (unlike most
particle-antiparticle pairs, which are identical in every respect but
charge), this study could help answer lingering questions about the
differences between matter and antimatter.
SLAC
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