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Belle is an international collaborative experiment at the
KEKB
B-factory at Tsukuba, Japan, which began taking data in June 1999.
Two Australian groups are members of the Belle Collaboration, our own
Falkiner High Energy Physics Group, and our
sister department at the University of Melbourne
(the
EPP group
)
Falkiner people involved in Belle are Hon. Assoc. Prof. Lawrence Peak, Drs.
Andrew Bakich, Bruce Yabsley and Kevin Varvell, and Ph.D students
Nick Parslow, Shoshanna Cole and Sam McOnie.
The experiment investigates small differences between in the decay properties of particles and antiparticles, in order to try to shed some light on the imbalance between matter and anti-matter in the universe, and also to improve our understanding of these interactions.
This search is carried out by studying the decays of B-mesons resulting from the collision of electrons and positrons at the KEKB B-factory. B-mesons are very short-lived - they normally decay within 2 trillionths of a second - but the mesons produced at the KEK B-factory will still travel a few tenths of a millimetre before decaying, far enough to be measured using modern silicon vertex detectors. We hope that these studies will furnish proof for more CP-violation than we currently know of. This would make significant differences to our understanding of particle physics, which is summarised in the Standard Model of particle physics.
The Falkiner group contributed to the construction, maintenance and calibration of various types of radiation monitors deployed in the experiment. Our main analysis effort is aimed at measurement of the elements of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa (CKM) matrix.
The latest results from Belle were presented at the major international conferences in high energy physics in 2005. Talks presented can be found on the Belle 2006 Conference page.
In November 2005, Belle achieved the major milestone of 500 inverse fb luminosity. See here for more details. Belle has now gone on to collect approximately 600 inverse fb of data. The KEKB accelerator holds the world record for luminosity, having exceeded a peak luminosity in excess of 1.5 times 10^34 per cm2 per second.
KEK,
the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation in Japan
The BELLE Collaboration home page
The KEKB B-factory