The Italian government has selected the SuperB project as one of its “flagship projects” in Italy for the coming years and has delivered initial funding as a part of a multiyear programme. Proposed by INFN, the project has already attracted interest from many other countries, with physicists from Canada, Germany, France, Israel, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, the UK and the US already taking part in the design effort.
SuperB will be an asymmetric electron–positron collider with a peak luminosity of 1036 cm–2 s–1. Such a high luminosity will allow the indirect exploration of new effects in the physics of heavy quarks and flavours at energy scales up to 10–100 TeV, through the studies at only 10 GeV in the centre-of-mass of large samples of B, D and τ decays. At full power, SuperB should be able to produce 1000 pairs of B mesons, the same number of τ pairs and several thousands of D mesons every second.
The key advances in the collider design come from recent successes at the DAΦNE collider at INFN/Frascati, at PEP-II at SLAC and at KEKB at KEK. These include new concepts in beam manipulation at the interaction region known as the “crab waist” scheme, which has been tested at DAΦNE.
The aim of the SuperB project is to conduct top-level basic research, while developing innovative techniques with an important impact for technology and other research areas. In this respect, the Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia is co-operating on SuperB with INFN. The accelerator will also be used as a high-brilliance light source, equipped with several photon channels, allowing the scientific programme to include the physics of matter and biotechnology.
