ScienceInsider

Italian physicists' hopes of getting their own particle smasher got a boost on Friday, when a national funding agency announced it would provide seed money to hammer out a detailed design of the machine. The €500 million accelerator, dubbed SuperB, would crank out particles called B mesons at rates 100 times higher than currently possible. It would also allow higher precision studies of a slight asymmetry between matter and antimatter called CP violation. The project is not a done deal-the Italian government would still have to decide to fund construction—but getting the design money does signify that the funding agency, the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), is on board with the plan. 

The new collider would complement the much bigger and more-powerful Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics lab, CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. Once it's running, the LHC will smash protons into other protons at incredible energies in an attempt to blast massive new particles into existence. In contrast, SuperB would fire electrons into antielectrons, or positrons, at much lower energies to produce particles called B mesons and a variety of other subatomic particles. Physicists plan to study how these particles decay to a very high precision and search for tiny deviations from the predictions of the theory known as the standard model. Such discrepancies could indirectly signal new physics, including phenomena beyond the LHC's grasp. For example, if new particles exist but are too massive for the LHC to make, then their "virtual" presence within B mesons could still affect the way those particles decay. 

Although the details remain to be worked out, INFN will provide between €1 million and €2 million a year over the next 2 or 3 years to design SuperB, says INFN Vice President Umberto Dosselli. The idea is to demonstrate that the SuperB plan will work and to persuade the Italian government to build the machine at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata," near the Frascati National Laboratory. The plan calls for recycling $200 million worth of magnets and other parts from the PEP-II collider, which cranked out B mesons at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, from 1999 until March of this year. 

INFN researchers will have to get moving, as the Japanese are planning a similar project. Scientists at the particle physics lab, KEK, in Tsukuba want to upgrade their current KEKB collider, which competed with PEP-II. The Japanese plan is to take a brute-force approach and cram more electrons and positrons into their machine. The Italian team will try something trickier: compressing the beams to nanometer size to increase the collisions without increasing the currents in the accelerator.  

Given the competition, INFN officials are hoping the Italian government will make a decision on SuperB soon. "2009 for us will be a critical year," says Dosselli. "We must have the first hints from our government what they think of our plan." 

Some observers say that the Japanese government may be more inclined to fund the Super KEKB upgrade given that Japanese theorists Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa won the 2008 Nobel Prize for their theory of CP violation, which was confirmed in experiments at KEKB and PEP-II. Dosselli jokes that he's got an idea to convince the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to fund SuperB: "We can sell it to the government as SuperBerlusconi." 

--Adrian Cho