SuperKEKB: back on track – better than ever

Particle accelerator SuperKEKB in Japan starts commissioning phase
After five years of upgrade work, the particle accelerator SuperKEKB at the Japanese research centre KEK has taken up operation again. In the first days of March 2016, the first stable beams of electrons and positrons were turning in the 3-kilometre-long ring. This is an important step towards producing particle collisions inside the similarly refurbished detector Belle II, which is still under construction by an international collaboration and will start operation in 2017. In the unprecedented large number of collisions of electrons and their anti-particles, physicists want to produce large numbers of B and D mesons as well as tau leptons. By studying very rare processes they hope to find new physics beyond the standard model of particle physics as well as an answer to the question why the universe consists of largely of matter even though equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been produced in the Big Bang.