Experimental Particle Physics

Physics of the Beauty Quark

The Standard Model of Particle Physics contains six quarks, one of them being the beauty-quark, or simply b-quark. It is highly unstable and decays via the weak nuclear interaction (also responsible for natural radioactivity) at the scale of one picosecond. Due to the strong nuclear force a large number of various baryons and mesons exists, having a rich and diverse phenomenology of interesting processes which can be studied. Among them we focus on the following three interconnected research focus points within the Innsbruck high energy physics group.

    ATLAS Detector Mesurements

    Our research focus areas:

    • CP violation: This is on matter-antimatter asymmetry in the decay of subatomic particles, which contributes to the corresponding large-scale asymmetry observable in our universe. Here our group studies this effect in the decay of neutral BS mesons, which besides the beauty quark also contain a so-called strange quark.
    • Lifetime: The large number of particles measured with the ATLAS experiment allows to do high precision measurements of various fundamental particle properties. With more than 2 million B0 meson decays (one such four body decay can be seen in the picture) recently we have performed the world’s most precise lifetime measurement.
    • Rare decays: They are dominated by higher order processes, where Physics beyond the Standard Model is expected to show up - if at all. Here we conducted a research project of so-called semi-rare decays of the B0 meson mentioned before.

    Emmerich Kneringer

    Associate Professor of Particle Physics
    PhD 1995, University of Innsbruck

    Gruppenseite

    Affiliations
    Institute for Astro- and Particle Physics, University of Innsbruck

    ATLAS Collaboration, CERN

    Portraitbild von Emmerich Kneringer

    In the past Emmerich Kneringer was working in the field of QCD phenomenology and in Higgs boson searches. Presently his research is on physics of the beauty quark, also called B-physics. Specific topics are, lifetime measurements of neutral B-mesons, rare decays, and CP violation in the B-system. The research is done in collaboration with various institutes which are also members of the ATLAS experiment at CERN.

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