Abstract:
The Babar experiment has been
built at SLAC to exploit PEP-II, a high luminosity asymmetric
e+e- collider which operates at the Upsilon (4S)
resonance (B factory). It has been designed to measure
time-dependent CP asymmetries in the decays of neutral B mesons,
whose interpretation in the Standard Model is directly related to the
parameters of the CKM mixing matrix. The original idea of an asymmetric
collider was proposed by Pier Oddone back in 1987, and ever
since then LBNL has been playing a major role in this project.
The experiment has been running for about a year and as
of last week, BaBar has logged
data, which corresponds
to 9 million Upsilon(4S)-->BBbar decays in flight.
This talk is a research progress report from the
BaBar experiment, with emphasis on the detector performance,
and the near future physics prospect