Yesterday, Jodi and I spent the day in Madison, WI. This is where, about three years ago, we graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with our degrees in physics. We took this opportunity not only to seek out our old haunts, but also to catch up with the groups that raised us as scientists. Jodi had lunch with her friends on the IceCube/AMANDA experiment, and I had lunch with my advisor Yibin. But, while I was passing time in the newly remodeled physics department before lunch, I sat in the library and looked for books to read.
I settled on the proceedings from a workshop on collider physics, edited by Robert Panvini and Jim Brau (both people I have known through the BaBar experiment) and entitled “Collider Physics: current status and future perspectives”. At first, I chose it because I knew the editors, but I soon settled into a review of two-photon physics. After reading the short review, which discussed charm production in two-photon interactions, I looked for another proceeding to read in the volume.
One caught my eye: a review of the prospects for a B factory, written by Elliot Bloom from SLAC. I just met Elliot for the first time in Moscow – we were stuck on the same flight out of town, and had a chance to chat. As I started reading this proceeding from 1987, I started to be struck with a real sense of history, and or origin. Elliot began by stating that the community widely regarded heavy flavor physics as important. The portentous statement came next – while the SSC will surely do much of this flavor physics, the production cross sections being SO large, surely the community might benefit from a dedicated B factory facility. Elliot then reviewed the many known and proposed techniques for doing such a factory. He described storage rings and linear colliders, crossing angle-based beams and asymmetric colliders. As he described these technical implementations, he then spoke of a proposal for such a facility at Stanford: the Stanford Beauty Factory, or SBF.
What I realized was these were the first birth pains of the BaBar/PEP-II B factory, and that what Elliot called “SBF” would eventually morph into the PEP-II asymmetric energy storage ring and the BaBar detector. The SSC would be cancelled just 6 years after Elliot wrote those proceedings, leaving the American particle physics enterprise wondering how to answer all the questions left bare by the SSC’s death. Out of this would rise the era of the flavor factories, the new injection of interest and capital into the LHC, and the push to construct the ILC. Not a bad way to kill time before lunch.
