BaBar celebrates 400th scientific publication

The BaBar Collaboration at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory recently celebrated its 400th scientific publication just in time for the group’s meeting. The collaboration published its 400th paper Tuesday, less than nine years after publishing its first in 2001. That’s an average of one publication per week, every week, for nearly nine years straight.

“I do not know of any other collaboration that has achieved such a production rate of outstanding quality science in particle physics; it is really something rare,” said BaBar spokesperson FRANCOIS LE DIBERDER.

For those of us who aren’t completely familiar with BaBar, there’s this accessible explanation from the SLAC web pages: “The BaBar experiment seeks to understand the violation of CP (charge parity) symmetry, the fundamental symmetry of nature that may explain why the universe contains more matter than antimatter. BaBar has shown that nature violates this symmetry in various surprising ways, but that it is not enough to explain all of the missing antimatter. BaBar has also led to a vastly increased understanding of how quarks interact with one another, and has the potential to find signs of new physics beyond the Standard Model of particle physics.”

Read more about it in an article by LAUREN KNOCHE in SLAC Today.