The Italian government has approved the long-term funding of the SuperB project. Mariastella Gelmini, the Italian minister for university education and research, announced on 19 April that the Interministerial Committee for Economic Programming had approved the National Research Plan 2011–2013. This sets out the future direction of 14 flagship projects, including SuperB.
The SuperB project is based on the principle that smaller particle accelerators, operating at a low energy can still give excellent scientific results complementary to the high-energy frontier. The project centres on 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 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 and the same number of τ pairs, as well as several thousand D mesons every second. The design is based on ideas developed in Italy and tested by the accelerator division of the National Laboratories of INFN in Frascati using the machine called Daφne.
Sponsored by the National Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), Super B is to be built in Italy with international involvement. Many countries have expressed an interest in the project and physicists from Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, the UK and the US are taking part in the design effort.
The Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia is co-operating with INFN on the project, which should help in the development of innovative techniques with an important impact in technology and other research areas. It will be possible to use the accelerator as a high-brilliance light source, for example. The machine will be equipped with several photon channels, allowing the extension of the scientific programme to the physics of matter and biotechnology.
