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 Our groups efforts currently are focused on measurement of weak decays of the charm and beauty quarks. These particles can decay in ways that violate a fundamental symmetry of nature called CP, where C stands for charge conjugation or the replacement of a particle by its anti-particle, and P stands for parity an idea that natural phenomena should be able to be described equally well by a right-handed or left handed coordinate system. CP symmetry has been long known (since 1964) to be violated in the decays of neutral K mesons. Its obervation in other particles is expected to reveal the inner most structure of weak decays and could possible be a clue as to why we live in a matter dominated world. We are currently working on the CLEO experiment and the LHCb experiment at CERN. The basic aim of our program is to find "new physics" or elucidate new physics found elsewhere using the weak decays of charm and b quarks. We have much experience designing and building Ring Imaging CHerenkov detectors (RICH) and silicon vertex detectors.

Our group was one of the founding institutions of the CLEO experiment which is located on the campus of Cornell University about 60 miles south of here. The CESR accelerator collides positrons (e+) with electrons (e-) at the center of the CLEO III detector. CLEO was a pioneering experiment for looking at the decays of b quarks. The energy of CESR has been lowered so now we can investigate many interesting properties of the charm quark.

We were the lead institution that constructed the Ring Imaging Cherenkov Detector (RICH) for the CLEO III upgrade that is now an integral part of CLEO-c More information is available on various aspects of this project including: a full description of design, operation and performance of the device in the CLEO RICH NIM article, test beam results from Fermilab , the "single ring prototype," the RICH electronics design, chamber construction, and the gas system designed at Minnesota. Rich notes on other topics explain more details of the entire system (in postscript).

Several photographs of the mating of the radiators to the photon detectors and the installation of the device in CLEO are shown here. (Click for photos.)

Our group was previously involved in the BTeV experiment that received a go ahead called CD-0 on Feb. 17, 2004 by the DOE and was terminated on Feb. 7, 2005

We joined the LHCb experiment on June 9, 2005.

RICH beam & cosmic tests Graduate student projects CLEO RICH NIM article
RICH installation photos RICH electronics RICH construction photos

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