Professors Alam and Ernst
The high energy research group is an active member a national collaboration of 22 institutions and more than 200 physicists called "CLEO." This group is studying electron-positron collisions in the center-of-mass region around 10 GeV at the Cornell Electron Storage Ring (CESR) which is about a three hour drive from Albany. CESR is one of the leading centers for the study of particles with charm and beauty. Groups studying the t (heavy lepton) and two-photon physics are also very active.
At CESR, electrons and positrons annihilate through a virtual photon to form u-ubar, d-dbar, s-sbar, c-cbar, b-bbar, and quark-antiquark pairs as well as to e+e-, m+m-, and t+t- lepton-antilepton pairs. This is an example of particle production through electromagnetic interactions. The lepton-antilepton pairs, which do not interact strongly, are observed as free particles in the CLEO detector. The strongly interacting quark-antiquark pairs cannot be seen as free particles. Instead, they hadronize and are detected as mesons and baryons. The first three lightpairs give rise to conventional light particles such as pions, kaons, protons, neutrons, etc. The last twopairs give rise to heavy flavor particles with the new quantum numbers of charm and beauty. CESR is a virtual charm and beauty flavor particle factory. At Albany, we have focussed on the study of charmed baryons, the heavy flavor analogue of the well-known neutrons and protons. Charmed baryons are produced directly from the hadronization of the pairs produced from electron-positron annihilations or from the decays of B mesons. Our goal is to complete the 20-plet of charmed baryons and to map their decay modes.
A second thrust of our research is to understand the production of baryons in B meson decays and to correlate the production of light and heavy flavor baryons. We have reported independent observations of new charmed particles and many new decay modes of different charmed baryons. We were also the first group to report the inclusive decays of B mesons to charmed baryons. Further work on related problems may be continued at the Large Hadron Collider being proposed at CERN in Europe. Much of our analysis is performed at an independent on-campus computing facility with a central processor capable of more than 100 million instructions per second. Additional equivalent computing power is dedicated to our computations at Cornell's Wilson Lab. We have more than 10 Gigabytes of hard disk on which we maintain a full complement of the data analysis programs as well as a large subset of CLEO data.
We have also developed a research program specializing in hadron identification at momenta up to 2.8 GeV/c. This is relevant for studying CP violation and other kinds of physics in a symmetric B-meson factory such as CESR. We have constructed a test setup with time-of-flight counters, aerogel Cerenkov threshold counters and a silicon beam telescope consisting of four planes of silicon microstrip detectors. The group has just joined an effort at Syracuse University to develop counters for the CLEO III Upgrade.
Albany High Energy Physics Lab
Website for the BaBar experiment
University Consortium for Linear Collider R&D
