BABAR time-dependent CP violation experiment Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-10-20
BABAR used asymmetric electron-Positron collisions near the Upsilon meson resonance to prepare neutral B meson pairs. It reconstructed one decay into charmonium plus a kaon, and used flavour tagging on the other B meson with charged leptons or kaons. Silicon tracking reconstructed decay vertices for the decay-time difference. Self-tagging decays calibrated mistags and time resolution; charged decays provided a control. The tagged time distributions established CP violation, limited by backgrounds, mistags and vertex alignment.[ref]
The Lorentz boost converts vertex separation to at leading order. Unequal beam energies thus make a time difference measurable as a distance.[ref]
Figure 1.
From flavour tag and decay vertices to a toy CP asymmetry
. Functional B meson readout above, an original illustrative time-dependent neutral-B CP asymmetry below. The curves are a teaching model, not measured events or a detector drawing. Details.
Bottom-quark jet tagging Created 2026-10-24 Updated 2026-11-05
Bottom-quark jet tagging identifies jets compatible with containing a hadron carrying a bottom quark. A sufficiently long-lived bottom hadron travels away from the primary interaction before its particle decay, so displaced particle tracks and a secondary decay vertex provide evidence about its identity. A lepton within the jet can supply additional evidence. A top quark instead decays before hadronization.
A tag is a statistical classification, so both the efficiency for bottom jets and mistaken tags from charm quarks or light jets require calibration. That calibration concerns the flavor tagging response; it is not interchangeable with a calorimeter calibration of deposited energy. Control samples in collision data can measure the tagging efficiency for specified momentum and topology selections; those selections determine where the result applies.[ref]
Decay vertex 2026-10-18
The reconstructed location at which a particle decays, inferred from the trajectories of its decay products. Comparing two decay vertices can determine a decay-time difference when the motion of the parent system is known.
Particle decay Created 2026-10-18 Updated 2026-11-05
Particle decay is a spontaneous transformation of an unstable particle into allowed final particles. Conservation of energy, momentum, electric charge and the relevant interaction's other conserved quantities constrain the possibilities. A decay can be energetically allowed yet absent or weak because its transition amplitude is suppressed.
For an isolated state with an approximately constant rest-frame decay rate, the surviving population follows an exponential in proper time. The mean lifetime and energy decay width obey . A moving particle's laboratory flight-time distribution also includes time dilation.
Experimentally, detectors reconstruct decay products and sometimes a separated decay vertex. Correcting for acceptance and reconstruction efficiency is necessary before interpreting their counts as a lifetime or branching fraction. Different decay channels compete to make the total width.
The magnetic rigidity gives the momentum, the bending direction gives the sign of electric charge, and the calorimetric energy then gives the mass. For planar tracks perpendicular to a uniform magnetic field, the Lorentz force and circular motion give
Trace each track away from its production or decay vertex. With the magnetic field into the page, a positive track bends counterclockwise and a negative track bends clockwise. For example, a positive particle initially travelling left accelerates downwards. The known incoming negative pion fixes the sign convention experimentally. A radius alone does not distinguish electric charge signs.
For a calibrated total energy , the relativistic energy-momentum relation gives
If the calorimeter instead supplies only kinetic energy , solve to obtain
Compare with candidate pion, kaon, and proton masses, together with the electric charge sign and shower behavior. An electron makes an electromagnetic shower; a muon is penetrating; a hadron generally requires a hadronic calorimeter and its own calibration. If either energy escapes or the response is uncalibrated, simply substituting a deposited signal for need not identify the particle correctly. The absent figure prevents attaching identities to individual drawn tracks, but the requested identification procedure does not require its geometry.
The labels X and Y cannot be uniquely assigned from the surviving text: their decay vertices and daughter tracks were contained in the missing figure. The available conservation laws nevertheless specify how the assignment would be obtained.
The initial state has , with denoting strangeness. At a primary strong interaction vertex all three numbers must be reproduced. A final Lambda baryon or Sigma baryon has , and therefore needs accompanying , for example a neutral kaon or a positive kaon , with the remaining electric charge balanced. At later weak interaction decay vertices, strangeness need not be conserved; it would be wrong to enforce it there.
A displaced pair with the appropriate invariant mass identifies . A displaced pair can identify after an invariant mass and kinematic check. For a candidate radiative Sigma-to-Lambda transition, the neutral parent satisfies
in natural units. Its photon energy in the parent rest frame is . With known charged four-momenta, each unobserved neutral momentum is the difference between the incoming and visible outgoing momenta at its vertex; its inferred direction must agree with the dashed segment.
This information cannot establish which dashed segment was called X. For a concrete ambiguity, both
obey the primary electric charge, baryon number, and strangeness constraints and can yield a neutral kaon decay plus a displaced Lambda baryon decay. Their distinct neutral segments and the extra photon would be resolved by the missing topology and kinematics. The supplied possible Sigma baryon decay alone is insufficient to label X and Y. A labelled answer is therefore a source gap, rather than a completed identification.
At the Z boson pole, the accessible primary fermion pairs are , , , the three channels, and . The top quark is too heavy. The charged channels also have photon exchange, and the electronic channel has a substantial nonresonant Bhabha scattering contribution. On-shell W boson pairs are above threshold; they are not primary decays.
A tau lepton pair gives two approximately back-to-back narrow low-multiplicity cones, usually one or three charged tracks per cone, with overall charge zero and missing energy and momentum from neutrinos. Opposite hemispheres can show electron, muon or hadronic tags. A decay vertex or track impact-parameter information helps establish the short tau lepton flight. Reject Bhabha scattering and dimuon events by their nearly full visible beam energy, particle identification and little missing momentum; reject ordinary quark multijets by their broader high-multiplicity activity and larger visible invariant masses. Control two-photon backgrounds with visible transverse momentum, forward activity and event geometry. Selection efficiencies depend on decay mode and must be calibrated.
A general-purpose collider detector surrounds the interaction region with complementary layers. The layout makes the measured signals useful together: tracks establish charged trajectories, calorimeters sum deposited energy, and outer detectors identify penetrating muons.
Near-hermetic coverage permits a missing transverse momentum estimate from the calibrated vector sum, signaling neutrinos or other invisible particles but also sensitive to detector failures and escaping jets. At a hadron collider the initial parton longitudinal momenta are unknown, so missing longitudinal energy cannot be inferred in the same way; an collider supplies stronger initial-state constraints. Every subsystem needs alignment, calibration and independent control samples for reliable combined reconstruction.
The long-lived, electrically neutral kaon often traverses the particle detector without decaying into a reconstructable charged final state. Identifying it through a hadronic interaction or missing four-momentum is much less efficient than reconstructing the short-lived kaon through its nearby two-pion decay vertex. The efficiencies must be applied to the observed counts before taking their asymmetry:
Using the leading aligned-amplitude approximation from c,
The exact aligned formula instead gives , an immaterial correction here. Treating the observed counts as independent Poisson random variables and the efficiencies as known, propagation of uncertainty gives
The separate contributions to are and ; the small sample dominates. Linear propagation of uncertainty yields , although the nonlinear extraction and physical boundary make a symmetric confidence interval a rough summary. Unknown efficiency uncertainties, especially that of , would be additional systematic contributions.
The supplied CKM matrix gives , hence and . The asymmetry difference is only about statistical standard deviations, so the measurement is compatible. Without the phase assumption, these data measure to leading order and do not uniquely measure the Cabibbo angle.
Tracking detector 2026-10-24
A particle detector that samples successive positions along charged-particle trajectories. Together with a known magnetic field, a fitted trajectory measures momentum, charge sign and an interaction or decay vertex.