SuperB is a high-luminosity electron-positron collider that was designed to reveal new physics through precision studies of rare or suppressed decays. The collider was supposed to be built near Rome, Italy, under the supervision of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, but was cancelled by the Italian government on 27 November 2012. The title SuperB refers to the fact that the collider was expected to produce very large quantities of B mesons. Another very important aspect of the SuperB experiment was that a large and competitive sample of D mesons was to be collected with a dedicated run at the so-called charm threshold, providing an additional environment to perform test of mixing and CP violation in the charm sector.
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Purpose
The designers hope that SuperB will help to provide evidence about the flavour (particle physics) sector of the Standard Model SuperB is intended to give further information about any new physics found by the Large Hadron Collider. It may also be able to check for violations of CP violation, which may contribute to an understanding of why the universe is full of matter and not antimatter. Accepted physical theory indicates that at the Big Bang equal quantities of matter and antimatter were created. However, when matter and antimatter meet they annihilate one another, so we should expect the universe to be empty. Physicists believe that CP violation may account for the discrepancy, and the designers hope that SuperB may be able to throw light on the question. They expect that SuperB will be able to make much more precise checks for CP violation than has been possible in the past.
SuperB should make it possible to observe matter and antimatter coexisting much as they did in the first moments of the universe, by means of the uncertainty principle. Unfortunately this situation is very unstable, and lasts for only a very brief time, but it is hoped to be able to take billions of quick glimpses, and thus build up a picture of what is happening.
Computing
The collaboration is investigating the use of grid resources to deliver the computing power needed by the experiment. This is after the success of the LHC Computing Grid (wLCG) used by the LHC experiments. The SuperB VO has been using resources provided by INFN Grid, France Grilles, Polish Grid Infrastructure PL-Grid and GridPP.