To find out the team created pairs of matter and antimatter particles, called B mesons and anti B mesons, and measured how they behaved. The study has come up with a better estimate of earlier measurements that suggest that there is a difference in the rate of decay (they decay into a kaon and pion).
"We have measured two differences of decay rates between b and anti-b," says Prof Hou. " It is around 9 per cent for neutral B and anti-B, and 7 per cent for charged B and anti-B. The bigger mystery, and gist of our paper, is posing the question of why there is this difference."
But the end of the article mentioned about waiting for more results out of BaBar at SLAC. I thought SLAC is no longer doing any particle collider experiment and is already being converted into the LCLS? Did something changed? Or are still going to do limited collider experiment in between LCLS runs?
Zz.
Addendum: I just finished reading the paper in Nature (Lin et al, Nature v.452, p.332 (2008)) and the Perspective on this work by Michael Peskin in the same issue of Nature. The BaBar result they are expecting is the analysis of the large, existing data that have already been collected. So it isn't from any future BaBar experiment. That clears things up a bit, at least for me.
More Addendum: See a report on this in PhysicsWorld.
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