Images Dated 30th April 1999

BaBar silicon strip detector, SLAC

BaBar silicon strip detector. Female physicist below the silicon strip vertex detector (SSD) for the BaBar particle detector. It is hoped that BaBar, at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, USA, will explain why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe. It will detect the B mesons and their antimatter equivalents, anti-B mesons, that result from the collisions of accelerated electrons and positrons. This detector lies at BaBar's heart and allows the fine tracks of charged particles emerging from the collisions to be observed. To explain the greater amounts of matter in the universe, B mesons should decay at a different rate from anti-B mesons

© DAVID PARKER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY