Roberto Petronzio, president of INFN has announced that the SuperB Factory, will be built at the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’. The facility tops the list of 14 flagship projects of the National Research Plan of the Italian Ministry for Education, Universities and Research.
The SuperB project involves the construction underground of a new asymmetric high-luminosity electron–positron collider. It will occupy approximately 30 hectares on the campus of the University of Rome ‘Tor Vergata’ and be closely linked to the INFN Frascati National Laboratories, located nearby. The project, which will ultimately cost a few hundred-million euros, obtained funding approval for €250 million in the Italian government’s CIPE Economic Planning Document. It has also attracted interest from physicists in many other countries. At the end of May, some 300 physicists from all over the world gathered on the island of Elba for a meeting that started the formal formation of the SuperB collaboration, a crucial milestone on the road towards realization of the accelerator.
SuperB will be a major international research centre for fundamental and applied physics. The high a design luminosity of 1036 cm–2 s–1 will allow the indirect exploration of new effects in the physics of heavy quarks and flavours through the studies of large samples of B, D and τ decays. The same infrastructure will also provide new technologies and advanced experimental instruments for research in solid-state physics, biology, nanotechnologies and biomedicine.
