Nature's quick-change artistry revealed
The CDF collaboration at Fermilab announced Friday that they have confirmed the oscillatory behavior of the Bs meson, which switches between matter and antimatter at the rate of 2.8 trillion times a second.
One of the largest university groups in the CDF collaboration is from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Kevin Pitts, associate professor of physics, is one of the co-leaders of the CDF physics group performing this measurement.
In addition to playing a major role in the analysis of the data, Pitts, along with his team of engineers, postdoctoral researchers, and graduate students, developed important components in the CDF data acquisition system that made the measurement possible.
"This measurement is one of several that would have been unthinkable were it not for the new system we developed here in Urbana,” Pitts said, “We thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of developing this very fast, very flexible system that can intelligently process more than 1 million events per second. We believe that further improvements to this system will continue to allow us to make new and exciting measurements for several years to come.” Read more...