High precision flavor physics measurements are an essential complement to the direct searches for new physics at the LHC. Such measurements will be performed using the upgraded Belle II detector and upgraded KEKB accelerator. The status of the Belle II detector and proposed role of the US Belle II collaborators are presented in this article.
Status of the KEKB accelerator and the detector, BELLE, is reported. The construction of the 3.5 Gev x 8 GeV electron-positron collider, and the solenoid detector, BELLE, was completed in December, 1998. The commissioning of them has been made since then. The BELLE detector has observed the first hadronic event from the beam collision on Jun 1, 1999. The achieved maximum luminosity by August 4th, 1999, was 3 x 10^32 cm^-2 sec^-1. The KEKB operation will be continued after two months of summer break.
High precision measurements in the quark flavor sector are essential for searching for new physics beyond the Standard model. SuperKEKB collider and Belle II detector are designed to perform such measurements. The status and prospects of the SuperKEKB and Belle II are presented in this article.
The introduction of magnetic charge into Maxwells equations has led to an extensive search for magnetically charged particles (magnetic monopoles). A particle model developed by one of us (DF) adds an additional feature to Maxwells symmetric equations in that the stable magnetic monopole should have the same charge strength as the electron. We have not found any experiments in high-energy physics that have explicitly ruled out this possibility. However, the few experiments at colliders that had no magnetic field might have observed a signal for these 1e strength magnetic monopoles as an unexpected enhancement in the mu+mu- production rate. The absence of any such observation leads us to set a tentative lower mass limit for these unit charge magnetic monopoles at 4.5-5 GeV/c2. Using a MC generator for magnetic charge and tracking these events through a simplified model of the BELLE II detector, we have found that the central drift chamber of BELLE II has a remarkably high efficiency for triggering on magnetically charged tracks. We suggest that the BELLE II collaboration perform a specific search for stable magnetically charged particles having a field strength of 1e when they run for the first time with colliding beams in 2018. This would be the first time anyone has specifically looked for such a particle.
Quarkonium is the bound state of a heavy quark and its anti-quark counterpart. The study of this system has experienced a renaissance thanks to results from e+e- collider experiments, including discoveries of long-predicted conventional quarkonia, and unusual states consisting of four quarks. The Belle Experiment operated at KEK in Japan from 1999-2010. Analysis of the collected data continues to produce new findings. The Belle II experiment is a substantial upgrade of both the Belle detector and the KEKB accelerator, aiming to collect 50 times more data beginning in 2018. This talk presented recent Belle results related to hadronic and radiative decays in the bottomonium system. It described the capabilities of Belle II to explore these topics, with a particular focus on the physics reach of the first data, where unique opportunities exist to make an immediate impact in this area.
The search for multi-quark states beyond the constituent quark model (CQM) has resulted in the discovery of many new exotic states, starting with the observation of the X(3872), discovered by Belle in 2003. Also in the sector of charm-strange physics the CQM does not seem to describe properly all spectrum, despite of theoretical expectations. These new forms of quark bounds clearly show that mesons and baryons are not the only possibilities to be considered. We shortly report in this paper selected recent results on searching for such states at Belle, with the perspectives in the hadron physics program at the Belle II experiment.