The press release about the ηb discovery went out earlier this week, accompanied in SLAC Today with a very nice photo of the primary physics researchers working on the search. Looking back to the “winter of insanity” that started in December, I find it incredible that in such a short period of time that we as a whole (BaBar) have begun to accomplish the goals that a few of us on BaBar saw as prime motivators for taking the collider to new energies. As Dr. Kovar, head of the DOE Office of High Energy Physics, puts it in the press release:
“Faced with the end of its run, the BaBar collaboration decided to
focus its remaining time on investigating some of the states of
bottomonium,” said Associate Director of the DOE
Office of Science for High Energy Physics Dennis Kovar. “This exciting
result achieves one of the principal aims of this final data collection
run.” [1]
Of course, and idea is only as good as the team willing to execute it. As I noted in the post in my professional blog [3], none of this would have been possible without the willingness and support of the DOE and SLAC, the evangelism of the BaBar management, and the tireless commitment of the men and women of the PEP-II accelerator, BaBar detector, computing and tools groups, and (of course) the researchers daily invested in teasing the eta_b out of hiding.
Here are the press releases. By the way, some of the wording about the eta_b might look familiar. I assure you, those words were used with permission of this author.
[1] http://www.interactions.org/cms/?pid=1026467
[2] http://home.slac.stanford.edu/pressreleases/2008/20080709.htm
[3] “Behold, the elusive ground state of bottomonium”
