After achieving its first electronpositron collisions this summer, the PEP-II B-Factory at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) was formally dedicated on 23 October.
And major advances towards the operation of the BaBar detector are being made. Having installed the instrumented flux return and the superconducting solenoid early this year, the first step of the detector’s integration has been completed by adding the barrel crystal calorimeter and the central drift chamber. Finally, the particle identification system and the forward endcap calorimeter were installed this autumn.
BaBar is now in a scheduled cosmic-ray run which will be concluded early next year with the addition of the silicon vertex tracker and when BaBar will roll into the B-Factory’s colliding electron and positron beams.
