The SuperB project, originally approved in 2009 by the Italian government, has recently been cancelled as a result of the economic stability issues found in Europe. There is the possibility of retaining the low energy physics part of the programme in the form of an extended run that would accumulate several inverse attobarns of data - and this option is under discussion within the collaboration. More details on this situation can be found on the Cabibbo Laboratory website.
The SuperB experiment is/was an approved high luminosity flavour physics experiment that will perform detailed studies of the decays of B, D, Υ mesons and τ leptons with billions of events. Using these events it will be possible to start reconstructing the Lagrangian for any physics beyond the Standard Model that may be encountered, and precise tests of the Standard Model of particle physics. The experiment will be built at the newly created Cabibbo Laboratory in Tor Vergata (near Rome), in Italy. More information on the SuperB experiment can be found at the following:
Members of the group working on SuperB can be found here.
Current research and development activities involve simulation studies of the performance of an all pixel detector concept, prototyping support structures for this detector, and we are starting to test prototype pixel sensors that are variants of a proposed SuperB pixel detector. More details on the generic detector R&D the group are involved in can be found on our SuperB detector R&D and Arachnid pages.
We are heavily involved in understanding the full potential of the physics programme of a Super Flavour Factory in relating particle physics with astrophysics and cosmological constraints, where Dr Bevan is a physics coordinator for the SuperB programme. Some of the major questions facing modern physics today are
In a nutshell we can express these questions as some variant of the more generic "As the Standard Model of Particle Physics is not complete - what is missing?".
There are two ways to try and answer this question: (i) collide increasingly higher energy particles together in the hope of making (and finding) something new, or (ii) perform precision measurements of rare or suppressed processes according to expectations from the Standard Model, in the hope that deviations from new physics may be manifest. The first route is the approach taken by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the LHC. The second route is the one taken by the Super Flavour Factories.
We have recently submitted a paper on the phenomenological implications of future time-dependent CP asymmetry measurements in D meson decays and how these can be used to search for new physics (arXiv:1106.5075).
The QMUL group is also involved in the UTFit collaboration, which does phenomenological research related to the SuperB physics programme.
The QMUL SuperB group have participated in the following publications:
These are highlights of recent SuperB related publications from our group
A comprehensive list of SuperB related presentations is maintained on a separate web page. Follow this link to view the QMUL group's conference presentations and full publication list information.
Please contact Dr. A. J. Bevan for more information.
(Local web pages containing information relevant to members of the group can be found here)