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Champagne Challenge
By Kate Metropolis
In less than a month last summer, five physicists, led by Roodman,
analyzed over 20 million events, found the mere 46 in which a B meson
decayed into two neutral pions, and prepared a paper for Physical Review
Letters. The group won the Champagne challenge for being the first to
submit a paper using data from run 3.
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Authors (l to r) Carlos Chavez (Univ. of Liverpool),
Adrian Bevan (Univ. of Liverpool), Aaron Roodman (Group EC), Markus
Cristinziani (Group EC), and Dmytro Kovalskyi (Univ. of Maryland) were
honored at the December BABAR
Collaboration meeting.
(Photo
by Diana Rogers) |
Zoltan Ligeti, a theorist at LBNL, called the results significant.
"Most theoretical expectations, none of which was rigorous, were
significantly smaller than the B ABAR
(and Belle) measurements," Ligeti says, "and it will certainly be a
challenge for theory to understand the data."
Regulations required that the prize—a bottle of champagne—be presented
to the winners off site and after hours, so each physicist received a
photograph at the meeting. |
