A successful start to preparations for the BaBar experiment

In June this year, the first part of new collider called PEP-II was commissioned. It will be used in an experiment to observe a rare effect in particle physics that could explain why there appears to be only matter and not antimatter in the Universe. The effect is called CPviolation, and the experiment will measure for the first time subtle differences in the way fundamental particles called Bmesons and their antiparticles decay. According to theory, particles and their antimatter partners should behave like exact mirror images of each other. However, the Bmesons and their antiparticles are predicted to break this mirror symmetry by a tiny amount.