IISER Mohali joined Belle I/II Collaboration
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Mohali has been accepted as an official member of the International Belle I/II collaboration. The membership is represented by Dr Vishal Bhardwaj, INSPIRE Faculty in Physics, IISER-Mohali. The name of the collaboration is based on the sophisticated detector situated at High Energy Accelerator Research Organziation (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan. Belle II experiment is a next-generation high precision B factory which will compliment the exploration of New Physics beyond the Standard Model currently being carried out at the energy frontier experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. Belle II is a successor of the Belle experiment whose results on CP violation measurements in B meson along with the BaBar experiment (rival experiment situated at SLAC, U.S.A.) resulted in Nobel prize to Prof. Makoto Kobayashi and Prof. Toshihide Maskawa in 2008. In 1972, both proposed three families of quarks and a CP violating phase in the quark mixing matrix (at that time only three quarks u, d and s were known). Verification of this hypothesis was the primary goal of the Belle experiment. Along with this, Belle experiment also resulted in many exciting results such as observation of tetra-quark like states and search for new physics. Belle results have been published in more than 450 publications in international journals of repute and still data analysis is going on. Belle Collaboration is an international collaboration with more than 400 scientists from 19 countries working together to unravel the mysteries of the universe. Success of the Belle resulted in the growth of the Belle II Collaboration. Currently more than 600 scientists from 23 countries are collaborating to build the Belle II detector. In India seven institues are full members, out of which four are IITs (Bhubaneswar, Guwahati, Hyderabad and Madras) while rests are IMSc, Panjab University and TIFR. Joining of IISER Mohali will increase the visibility of India in Belle I/II collaboration along with opening doors for exciting opporunities for IISER Mohali students. IISER students and research scholars will get an opporunity to work at KEK, Japan. In Belle II experiment, electrons and positrons will be accelerated in three kilometer long upgraded SuperKEKB circular accelerator travelling near the speed of light and eventually smashed near Upsilon(4S) energy resulting in production of about 1000 B mesons pairs per second. The record luminosity will result in accumulation of 50 times more data (as compared to Belle experiment which already has the largest data collected near Upsilon(4S) resonance) enabling scientists to study B meson decays with highest precision ever. IISER Mohali plans to take active participation in installation and commisioning of the silicon vertex sub-detector where other Indian institutes are already making great contribution. In addition, IISER Mohali will participate in the data acquisition and its analyses.