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) in Tsukuba, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan.
The Belle detector, located at the collision point of the
e−
e+
asymmetric-energy collider (KEKB), is a multilayer 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 the momenta range from MeV/c till few GeV/c (provided by a novel 100Cherenkov 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 B mesons, D mesons, and tau particles have been carried out and have resulted in almost 300 publications in physics journals.
Highlights of the Belle experiment so far include
- the first observation of CP-violation outside of the kaon system (2001)
- observation of: and
- measurement of using the Dalitz plot
- measurement of the CKM quark mixing matrix elements and
- observation of direct CP-violation in and
- observation of transitions
- evidence for
- observations of a number of new particles including the X(3872)
The Belle experiment operated at the KEKB accelerator, the world's highest luminosity machine. The instantaneous luminosity exceeded ×1034 cm−2·s−1. The integrated luminosity collected at the 2.11
ϒ
(4S) resonance mass is ~ fb−1 (corresponds to 771 million 710
B
B
meson pairs). Most data is recorded on the
ϒ
(4S) resonance, which decays to pairs of B mesons. About 10% of the data is recorded below the
ϒ
(4S) resonance in order to study backgrounds. In addition, Belle has carried out special runs at the
ϒ
(5S) resonance to study
B
s mesons as well as on the
ϒ
(1S),
ϒ
(2S) and
ϒ
(3S) resonances to search for evidence of Dark Matter and the Higgs Boson. The samples of
ϒ
(1S),
ϒ
(2S) and
ϒ
(5S) collected by Belle are the world largest samples available.
The Belle II B-factory, an upgraded facility with two orders of magnitude more luminosity, has been approved in June 2010.[1] The design and construction work is ongoing.
See also
References
External links
Coordinates: 36°09′28″N 140°04′31″E / 36.15778°N 140.07528°E