Physics

Liverpool physics interests on BaBar                             (What we actually work on!)
Students physics interests on BaBar at Liverpool         (What students here actually work on!)
General Physics interests of BaBar                               (The physics accessible to the experiment as a whole.)
Search for more information                                             (These include some non-specialist links for the general public as well as preprint servers etc.)
sin2beta publications/references in order, giving BaBar's most recent value for this number.

Liverpool's Physics Interests

The Liverpool group has leading involvements in the following physics analysis efforts :

Charmonium decays of B mesons and in particular (B->Jpsi K) , for charged and neutral B.

B0->Jpsi Ks, Ks->pi0pi0 : analysis carried out exclusively by our group
B+->Jpsi K+ : analysis carried out exclusively by our group
B0->Jpsi Ks, Ks->pi+pi- : analysis lead by our group
B0->Psi(2S) Ks and B0->chi_c1 Ks with Ks->pi0pi0 : analysis being developed by our group
B0->Jpsi omega (starting)
Responsibility for Maintenance and Upgrades of the software for the reconstruction of all charmonium final states

Branching fraction measurements of the above modes.
Extraction of the first CP violation signal ( measurement of sin(2beta) ) from B⁰->Jpsi(Psi(2S)) Ks decays.
Di-lepton analysis leading to the measurements of B mixing, B lifetime and T(CP) violation in mixing.

Charmless decays of B mesons

We have a major role in the time-dependent analysis of the decay B0->rho⁺ rho^-, which provides a first clean measurement of the CKM angle alpha. There is a journal paper submitted on this work, from analyzing 88 million B pair decays. We also updated this analysis for Moriond '04 on 113/fb (see talk by L. Roos).

From the outset, we have played a major role in the analysis of the decay B⁰->pi⁰pi⁰ The aim of studying this mode in detail is the measurement of the alpha parameter in the unitarity triangle. For B⁰->pi⁰pi⁰, this is via an isospin analysis based on charmless two-body amplitudes The public results on this work are hep-ex/0207063, SLAC-PUB-10092 and PRL 91 (2003) 021801.

The group is also working on alternative measurements of sin2beta. There is great interest in measuring sin2beta penguin dominated rare B decays as new physics contributions to such decays can allow us to probe new physics.

The group is active in the following areas, where Liverpool physicists are convening Analysis Working Groups (2 out of 19 total in BaBar) :

Charmless ; measuring sin2alpha and alternate measurements of beta are is its priority

Charmonium; measuring sin2beta is its priority

Luminosity measurements

Neutral particle reconstruction

Pentaquark searches

BaBar Physics

There is a mountain of physics accessible to the BaBar (and Belle) experiments. These range from the activities that the Liverpool group are interested in now to equally taxing measurements that will be under study when we get enough data to attempt them. The BaBar physics book is a good starting point to get an overview of the big picture of what BaBar is aiming to do in its lifetime.

Now that the experiment has data and many people are working hard to analyse this, there are many publications available on the web. The first paper released by the BaBar collaboration was a measurement of sin(2beta). Since then the experiment has produced may conference and journal papers on the physics being studied at BaBar.

A list of the conference papers submitted in summer 2002 is here, the full listing is here.

Search for information

Are you asking yourself; Why are these people going to such efforts? What are they doing anyway and what does it really mean? or something equally fundamental? Perhaps you should search around the web for a bit more information. Not everything out there is a journal paper! There are lots of sources aimed at the general public as well as a physics based audience and hopefully a few of the links below will start you off in the right direction to at knowing what we do and why we think it is important.

The people page has links to slightly more detailed descriptions of what the academic members of the group (including the students) are interested in a do.