Current Experimental Pursuits
The KTeV experiment has been a great success and the UVa KTeV group has had a major role in that success. We have detected new forms of time reversal violation and have measured a parameter called epsilon prime that has been sought after since the first (Nobel Prize winning) observation of time reversal violation by Cronin and Fitch more than 35 years ago. By observing that this parameter was non zero, we showed that the time reversal violation was an intrinsic part of the weak radioactive decay interaction of nature. Our measurement of this parameter and the observation of another new and novel time reversal violation effect (made primarily by the UVa group) was deemed the best physics of 98-99 by the U.S. Department of Energy. This experiment has been one of the major accomplishments of the UVa Physics Department in the last ten years. Follow these links to news articles about the KTeV discoveries: Physics News; U.Chicago News; APS Focus; and, Fermilab Today.
The KLOE detector's main mission is to study CP violation with a sensitivity of zero (10-4) and is fully capable of investigating a whole range of other physics. The scale of KLOE is driven by a fundamental parameter, the mean decay path length of the long lived K0 meson L(KL).
HyperCP, the first approved experiment initiated by the High Energy Group at the University of Virginia, has been a major success. We are an international collaboration of nine institutions, lead by Craig Dukes, and including the Nobel prize winner and former director of Fermilab, Leon Lederman. The goal of the experiment is to search for novel sources of the asymmetry between matter and antimatter, or CP violation, in nature, through the study of hyperon and kaon decays. The experiment completed data taking in 2000, having recorded the largest data set ever taken. The UVa HyperCP group has played a major role in the experiment since its inception, having built a significant fraction of the spectrometer. A preliminary result, based on about 1.7% of the data (and 150 times more data than that from the best previous result), was reported at the International Conference on CP Violation Physics, at Ferrara, Italy, and was called "the highlight of the conference". The work done in analyzing our enormous data sample was highlighted as a "tour de force" at the International Conference on Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics in Beijing, China. HyperCP is doing other physics as well, indeed our first physics publication, which resolves an outstanding experimental discrepancy, is a measurement of an important flavor-changing neutral-current decay branching ratio.
D-Zero, located at the Fermilab Tevatron, continues to be one of the foundation experiments of the US HEP program, offering a rich agenda of physics discovery through the end of the decade. Recent detector and accelerator improvements are providing the first opportunity for precision studies of the top quark, greatly expanded reach for discovery of new physics processes, and improved sensitivity for measurements of Electroweak sector of the Standard Model. A search for the Higgs boson, whose interactions are theorized to give rise to the observed particle masses, will be a strong component of the Run II physics program. Until the onset of the LHC era, the Tevatron experiments offer the only opportunities in the world for discovery of the Higgs. D-Zero is taking data now, click here for a sampling of live collisions from our data acquisition system.
Summary of MIPP research activities coming soon...
Summary of CMS research activities coming soon...
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HyperCP
CMS