The Babar experiment is a high-energy physics experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The aim of the experiment is to study the properties of the Higgs boson and to search for new particles. The experiment is named after the cartoon character Babar, who is also known as “the little elephant with big ears”.
The LHC is a particle accelerator that collisions protons together at high energies. The proton beams are produced by two accelerators, one in each direction, that collide in the center of the detector. The LHC has a ring circumference of 27 kilometers (17 miles) and accelerates protons to an energy of 6.5 TeV (tera electron volts).
The Babar detector is located at one of the interaction points of the LHC where proton beams collide. It consists of several layers of detectors that are used to measure different aspects of the collision events. The innermost layer consists of silicon microstrip detectors which are used to track charged particles. The next layer consists mainly of scintillating fibers which are used to measure energy deposits from particles passing through them. Finally, there is an electromagnetic calorimeter which measures photons and electrons coming from the collision event.
In addition to these main detector components, there are also trigger counters and muon chambers which help identify interesting events that should be recorded for further analysis. Data from all these detectors is read out by computers and sent to storage servers where it can be accessed by physicists around the world.
So far, data taking has been very successful and scientists have already published several papers based on data from the first run of the LHC (from 2009-2013). In particular, scientists have been able to confirm many Standard Model predictions as well as discover new particles such as the Higgs boson.