BABAR Collaboration Meeting Draws Global Audience

When approximately 340 BABAR collaborators from nine countries descended on SLAC for a week in December, they weren’t just after your parking space. They came to discuss the state of the BABAR detector—what they’ve learned from it so far and what’s next.

"We had a very exciting collaboration meeting from December 9 through 14," said Marcello Giorgi, the BABAR spokesperson. Bringing together researchers from 74 institutions in Canada, China, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Russia, the UK and the United States, the meeting included plenary sessions on analysis, computing and the detector, with parallel sessions on more specialized topics.

The BABAR management team: (top row, from left) Livio Lanceri, Physics Analysis Coordinator; Marcello Giorgi, Spokesperson; Bill Wisniewski, Technical Coordinator; (Bottom row, from left) AJ Stewart Smith, Senior Advisor; Barbara Barrera, Administrator; Stephen Gowdy, Computing Coordinator (photo by Tom Mead)

A discussion of experimental results was a primary focus of the meeting. Groups working on similar analyses collaborate to produce journal papers and conference presentations. The meeting provided a forum to discuss analysis results prior to public release. Then there is the detector itself—the maintenance and upgrade work recently done on it, performance after the work and the ‘lessons learned’ for future maintenance and upgrade shutdowns. Finally, the researchers discussed how to ensure they have the needed computing power to utilize data from the BABAR experiment.

"There was a committee formed to review how we do our computing," said Barbara Barrera, the BABAR administrator. "They came up with recommendations for a revised model." Another committee reported on improving the muon detector system.

Physicists at the meeting also used the time to look ahead. "People are starting to talk about the future, because physicists always have to be thinking about the next project," Barrera said. This enables scientists to get the funding they need in time to begin new experiments.

The next BABAR collaboration meeting at SLAC will be held during the last week of February.