A particle accelerator SuperB factory

The SuperB Factory, a major international research center for fundamental and applied physics will be built on the campus of the University of Rome 'Tor Vergata'. The project proposed by the INFN is the first on the list of the 14 flagship projects of the National Research Plan of the Italian Ministry for Education.

The announcement was made last week by Roberto Petronzio, President of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics. 300 physicists from all over the world gathered in Elba island (Italy) for the kick-off meeting of SuperB, which marked a crucial milestone on the road towards realization of the accelerator. The project involves the construction of a large underground electron-positron collider which will occupy an area of approximately 30 hectares on the University of Rome 'Tor Vergata' campus and be closely linked to the INFN Frascati National Laboratories, located nearby. The SuperB, which will ultimately cost few hundred million euros, obtained funding approval for 250 million euros in the Italian government's CIPE Economic Planning  Document.

"This is the first time an accelerator has been designed from the outset to satisfy the needs of both fundamental and applied physics," said the President of the INFN, Roberto Petronzio. "The SuperB represents a historical opportunity for these two important international communities to meet. The project fits naturally into a context of international collaborations and will contribute to reinforcing Europe's leading position in high energy physics, which already has its guiding light in CERN in Geneva."

The Italian government has approved in May 2011 an ambitious project, the SuperB factory. This e+e- collider with its extremly high targeted luminosity (100 times more than previously achieved) will bring from 2016 onwards crucial information about the physics beyond the standard model that is likely to be discovered soon at the LHC. Construction of the accelerator will take about 15 years. The project will create two rings (1.3 miles each) that will be used to accelerate electrons and positrons, and then collide and produce heavy B mesons.   The luminosity of the collider (the average number of collisions per unit area of ​​the beam for the second) will be at least two orders of magnitude greater than all the previous experiments. In particular, the creators compare their factory with the American BaBar experiment at the National Accelerator Laboratory Fermi name (it was stopped in April 2008), as well as the Japanese experiment Belle.

"Nature News" emphasized the fact that the project is experiencing financial difficulties. The Italian government has allocated 250 million euros. But some estimates point to the final cost close to 600 million euros. United State will provide some assistance in form of "second hand" components from the BaBar detector. However, because of the crisis they have refused to participate in cash. Italian government is trying to negotiate some funding from Russia and some other European countries.

 It was also noted by "Nature" that not all scientists are happy about the project:

"Not everyone in the Italian physics community is happy with the project. When SuperB was being presented to the ministry for funding last December, Mario Calvetti, then director of INFN's Frascati National Laboratory, resigned in order to voice his opposition. "My reckoning is that SuperB will take 15 years to complete, and it will end up draining resources from the other INFN experiments," he says. INFN activities include many other large-scale experiments, such as neutrino and dark-matter research at the Gran Sasso Laboratories, the Virgo gravitational-wave observatory near Pisa and a strong involvement in the LHC. "

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Source:
nature.com, 10 Oct 2011 SuperB particle-accelerator project launches
SuperB, Project website