PEP-II’s Luminous Life
By Mason Inman
Just as proud parents mark their children’s height on the kitchen wall,
SLAC staff marked a major achievement in the life of PEP-II on April 12.
“We’ve delivered a total of 200 inverse femtobarns to the BABAR
detector since the start of the project,” said Michael Sullivan (AD). An
inverse femtobarn is a measure of the number of particle collisions in a
period of time. Since July 1999, PEP-II has been colliding electrons and
positions to produce B and anti-B mesons as fodder for the BABAR
detector.
More collisions mean more data for experimentalists to analyze.
“PEP-II is trying to keep BABAR
very busy but somehow they seem to keep up!” said John Seeman (AD).
“Many thanks to all the support groups and operations staff that make
PEP-II and BABAR
such a great science tool,” he added.
PEP-II is now smashing particles like never before. The whole system has
been continually tuned and improved over its five-year lifespan, and it
is currently producing collisions at roughly three times the rate it was
in its early days.
PEP-II took about 27 months to deliver its first 100 inverse femtobarns,
Sullivan said. Because of all the improvements, the current run ending
in July should deliver a total of 100 inverse femtobarns in only nine
months. This would meet a goal the team set for themselves at the
beginning of the run, and bring the lifetime total to roughly 250
inverse femtobarns.
More collisions isn’t the only benefit of making PEP-II run more
smoothly. “When the machine is well-tuned, the backgrounds tend to
remain low,” Sullivan said. When the backgrounds are lower, then the
data pouring out of PEP-II is less noisy, so experimentalists have to
sift through less data to find the interesting physics.
Three recent improvements to PEP-II have increased its luminosity, a
measure of how well the electron and positron beams are colliding, to a
new record for the machine. The electron storage ring was switched over
to trickle charge mode in March, in which more electrons are injected
continuously into the ring, rather than in spurts throughout the day
(see TIP, April 2, 2004). Keeping the number of electrons high all the
time increases the number of collisions that are possible.
In addition, the number of bunches of electrons and positrons traveling
around the rings was edged up by 15 percent to 1,556, bringing the
machine closer to its limit of 1,700 bunches. Yet another improvement
was in squeezing down the beams, making them denser and making
electron-positron collisions more likely. All these improvements have
brought PEP-II to a peak luminosity of 8.34 x 1033/cm2s, approaching
three times the design luminosity.
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