Bottom Quark Studies

University Of Rochester, Rochester NY

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal requests support for the research program of the high energy physics group at the University of Rochester. This group has concentrated on electron-positron colliding beam physics, working within the CLEO collaboration at the CESR electron-positron storage ring located at Cornell University and supported by the NSF. Past studies by this group have focussed on b quark decay. During the previous three-year CGI award, members of the Rochester group have played leadership roles in CLEO, as Analysis Coordinator and as CoSpokesman. As part of the NSF-sponsored upgrade of the CESR accelerator and CLEO detector to CLEO III, they have helped in the design and construction of a new drift chamber for finding and measuring charged particles. In physics analysis of CLEO II data, they have studied the decay of the b quark to charm and anticharm quarks, a study which helps explain why the measured b quark decay rate to electrons or muons is smaller than expected theoretically. During the three-year period of this proposal, the group plans two major physics analysis projects. The first is a study of charmless semileptonic b decay, i.e., b u l n, which should lead to a measurement of the CKM matrix element V(ub) to an accuracy of 10%. The actual measurments will be of the decays B p l n and B r l n which cover a large fraction of the b u l n phase space. The second project is a search for and study of the rare b decay processes b s g, b s l+ l-, and b s n n-bar down to levels predicted by the Standard Model of quarks and leptons in order either to find evidence for physics beyond the Standard Model, e.g., supersymmetry, or to place severe constraints on such models.