SuperB Experiment

SuperB was a proposed high-luminosity electron-positron collider that was cancelled by the Italian government on 27 November 2012. The collider was supposed to be built near Rome, Italy, under the supervision of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare. The title SuperB referred to the fact that the collider was expected to produce very large quantities of B mesons.

The designers hoped that SuperB would help to provide evidence about the flavour sector of the Standard Model. SuperB was intended to give further information about any new physics found by the Large Hadron Collider. It may also have been able to check for sources 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 hoped that SuperB may be able to throw light on the question. They expected that SuperB will be able to make much more precise checks for CP violation than has been possible in the past.

SuperB should have made 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. This situation is very unstable, and lasts for only a very brief time, but it was hoped to be able to take billions of quick glimpses, and thus build up a picture of what is happening.

The collaboration was investigating the use of grid resources to deliver the computing power needed by the experiment. This was 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.

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