BaBar's first collisions
26 May 1999
Early on the morning of Wednesday 26 May, 1991, the BaBar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California saw its first electron-positron collisions. BaBar has been designed to detect subtle differences between particles and antiparticles produced in the head-on collisions between electrons and positrons in the PEP-II storage rings at SLAC. Specifically, the experiment will study what are known as B-particles, and their antiparticles, referred to as B-bar. This image shows one of those first collisions, with the tracks of several charged particles produced in the collision, and deposits of energy (red blocks) left by both charged and neutral particles.
Credit: BaBar
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