Grant: Subatomic Physics Envelope - Project

This grant supports experimental research probing the flavour sector of particle physics with high luminosity electron-positron collision data. SuperB collisions will start in 2018 at the Cabibbo Lab in Italy and this grant will be used primarily to fund students, postdocs and some technical personnel and travel to complete the research and development and to begin construction of the SuperB detector's drift chamber. The SuperB facility will produce 100 times the data sample of the previous generation facility. Such a precision frontier facility will open an exciting window on new energy scales beyond the reach of existing colliders, including the LHC, by virtue of quantum loop corrections which are sensitive to very massive, and as yet undiscovered, particles. These hypothesized particles manifest themselves in precision measurements of processes involving bottom and charm quarks and tau leptons introduced by massive particles that are predicted in beyond-the-Standard Model theories. New physics can also reveal itself via the presence of processes that are forbidden within our current understanding of physics. Half the construction effort of the SuperB drift chamber is being provided by the Canadian group with the other half from our INFN (Italian National Laboratory for Nuclear and Particle Physics) partners, primarily at the Frascati National Laboratory. The Canadian contribution to this effort will solve the technological challenges to making precision measurements of the trajectories and specific ionization energy loss of charged particles in a new high-intensity experimental environment. In the course of this work, we will continue our explorations of a new technological solution to the problem of measuring the energy lost by a charged particle as it passes through helium-based gases. This innovation, known as ""cluster counting"", counts the number of clusters of ionization per cm created by the passage of a charged particle through the gas. It can substantially improve the performance of the instrument, both in theory and as indicated by our preliminary R&D work to date. If this part of our research shows that such improvements can be realized in practice, SuperB will be the first instrument to deploy this technology in a fully operational environment.