The Rochester Group will be conducting research on BES-III in Beijing with the goals to study in open-charm production and to measure, with high precision through Dalitz analysis, phase information on the decays of neutral D mesons into Kshort pi pi final states with different tags for CP even and CP odd. This information can then be used by B factories and LHCb to determine the value of the CKM mixing angle gamma (or Phi3). Additional aspects of the program include the study of radiative decays of D mesons and searches for rare/forbidden decays, which are highly suppressed in the Standard Model, and if observed would be indicative of new physics. The Broader Impacts of the program included assisting with the Rochester PREP program, a summer program for high-school age women to promote further science interest in those who have yet to take high school physics.
Prior to the 2-year grant period just completed, we started our involvement in the BES-III particle physics experiment, using the new BEPC-II storage ring and BES-III detector at the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) in Beijing, China. During the grant period just completed, we developed software tools for BES-III based on those we developed and found useful in CLEO, a particle physics experiment located at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Our analysis projects involved studing the decay of neutral D mesons to neutral kaons and a pair of charged pi mesons, and a search for the decay of neutral D mesons into two gamma rays. The former, when combined with data from an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, (LHCb), will lead to improved knowledge of the Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Mashkawa (CKM) matrix element gamma. Concerning broader impacts, all of the group's activities combine research with education at the graduate and post-graduate level. Since 1981, the group has produced fourteen Ph.Ds. Three are women. One of our Ph.Ds has smoothly made the transition from experimental particle physics to global climate change research, demonstrating the broad usefulness of a particle physics education. Practical benefits to society from elementary particle physics are invariably indirect. The classic example is the World Wide Web, developed at CERN to improve communications among collaborators on large experiments. One might speculate that our invovlement in an experiment in Beijing, China will help the U.S. high energy physics community get to know our counterparts in China, and in a small way, help the U.S. and China get to know each other better.
