Today, KEK announced that a groundbreaking ceremony will be held on Friday, November 18, to celebrate the official start of KEK's new particle physics experiment, the “SuperKEKB project”, marking a significant step forward in the search for the origin of our universe.

Professor Masanori Yamauchi, deputy director of the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies, KEK, said, "SuperKEKB is a major upgrade to our already successful KEK B-factory. We will generate collisions of high energy electrons and positrons at a rate that is roughly 40-fold higher than the previous rate by replacing various components of the accelerator and the detector."

The predecessor of the SuperKEKB project, KEK B-factory, which currently has the world’s highest luminosity (the rate of particle collisions in the experiment), has helped to confirm Kobayashi Maskawa's theory* and has led to the discovery of new types of hadrons with four quarks as well as hinting at a new physics beyond the Standard Model. The Japanese government decided to fund the first of the five-year upgrade projects for the accelerator, and physicists from around the world are now teaming up for the upgrading of the particle detector.

Atsuto Suzuki, the director general of KEK, said, "We invite all interested overseas parties to join our collaboration, and are happy to officially announce that KEK and our funding agency now welcome people from all over the world to join us in celebrating the groundbreaking ceremony for SuperKEKB."

The Belle detector, which recorded electron-positron interactions in the previous B-factory experiment, will also undergo a major upgrade to create a new collaboration Belle-II experiment, with the participation of a number of foreign institutes.

"We are excited to embark upon this major challenge of exploring new physics beyond the Standard Model",　explained Professor Peter Krizan (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), who is also the spokesperson of the experimental group. "Belle-II will be one of the international focal points for particle physics in the next decade."

"Fifteen European institutes have formed a team to develop a novel silicon pixel detector for Belle II," explained Professor Christian Kiesling (Max Planck Institute for Physics), who represents the German institutes in the team. He went on to say that the detector will measure the collision products with unprecedented accuracy. “We are proud to take on this major responsibility in the Belle II collaboration."

The media program at the KEK Tsukuba Campus will include a press tour to the accelerator and the detector, a press briefing, and the groundbreaking ceremony for the SuperKEKB project.

Source: KEK website