Helen Quinn remembers the good old days of physics. As a young professor in the 1970s, she came of age when the standard model of quantum mechanics was developing. "It's absolutely the basis of all high-energy physics today," says Quinn, BS '63, MS '64, PhD '67, a physicist at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Now, Quinn and her colleagues are on the brink of a new golden era, pushing beyond the standard model. Their tool is the $177 million Asymmetric B-Factory, a project that has been spitting out data for much of this year. The questions scientists are trying to answer are, quite literally, cosmic. At the facility's dedication last fall, then-Provost Condoleezza Rice said they included: "Why are we here? How did we get here? How was that possible?"
At issue is a seeming contradiction: the standard model suggests that all matter should have been destroyed billions of years ago when it collided with antimatter just nanoseconds after the Big Bang. But since the universe is instead filled with stuff -- stars, plants, people -- scientists are left to wonder why matter exists.
That's where the B-Factory comes in. By modifying the original linear accelerator (see illustration) to include a $110 million particle detector nicknamed BaBar, scientists are generating particles known as B-mesons, which are mixtures of matter and antimatter. Physicists are measuring the subtle behavior of B-mesons in hopes of explaining the predominance of matter. Early results may come within months.
Some at SLAC quietly admit that this project could mean a bonus beyond simple discovery -- a Nobel Prize. The last SLAC scientist to win the coveted honor was Martin Perl, in 1995.
But most seem to revel in the pure science. "We are guessing this is one of the windows we can look through to see beyond the standard model," Quinn says. "We don't think this is the full answer."
