The search for charmed states of matter

With the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012, the Standard Model of particle physics was completed. This description encompasses all known subatomic particles and their interactions. Much of the public interest in high-energy physics now focuses on experimental searches for ‘new physics’ beyond the Standard Model. Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that the Standard Model is now fully understood. Many questions remain about the ways in which known fundamental particles interact and unite, especially at the very high energies needed to produce the most exotic varieties, such as heavy quarks (quarks are the constituents of hadrons, which include the ordinary nuclear particles protons and neutrons) and heavy leptons (leptons are members of the family that includes electrons). The Beijing Electron-Positron Collider (BEPC), operated by the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of High Energy Physics, is one of the installations that are probing these questions. It has been running since 1988, using a detector called the Beijing Spectrometer (BES). (The site also houses the Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility for conducting studies in condensed matter using intense X-rays.) Since 2008, these two instruments have been operating in upgraded form: the BESIII detector and BEPCII accelerator. The facility is now one of the key international centers for investigating the properties and behavior of new exotic hadrons, in particular those that include the charm quark. Italian physicist Luciano Maiani, Director of the European particle physics center CERN in Switzerland from 1999 to 2003, is one of the world leaders in this area of high-energy physics, and played a central role in the identification of the charm quark itself. NSR spoke to him about the aims of the latest work at the BEPCII, and the prospects for new discoveries.