William Ford
Professor. Ph.D. Princeton University, 1967.
Professor Ford is an experimentalist in elementary particle physics. He
currently collaborates in the BaBar experiment operating at the Stanford
Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California. The goals of this research
are to elucidate the elementary interactions of quarks and leptons. The
storage ring at SLAC provides colliding beams of electrons and positrons.
The annihilation energy produces particles that are detected in large,
multilayered systems of tracking and energy conversion devices to produce
a record of each event. The records tell us about the production and decay
mechanisms which we compare with models derived from the elementary force
laws. The BaBar experiment is producing a rich variety of findings about
B
mesons, charm mesons and baryons, and tau leptons. It is designed particularly
for the study CP symmetry violation in
B meson decays.
Professor Ford's group detector efforts have centered mainly on tracking
devices: vertex drift chambers for the Mark II experiment at SLAC, a large
central drift chamber system that was planned for SSC, and the main tracking
chamber for BaBar. Physics interests include weak
interaction properties as measured by lifetimes, branching fractions, and
decay dynamics of weakly decaying particles.
Selected Publications
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"Lifetime of Particles Containing b
Quarks," MAC collaboration; E. Fernandez et al., Phys. Rev
Lett. 51, 1022 (1983).
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"Measurement of the tau lepton
lifetime", CLEO Collaboration; R. Balest et al., Physics
Letters B 388, 402 (1996).
-
"Two-body B Meson Decays
to eta and eta': Observation of B->eta K*", CLEO Collaboration; S. J. Richichi,
et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 85, 520-524 (2000).
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"Observation of CP Violation in B-->eta'K0 Decays", BaBar Collaboration, B. Aubert et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 031801 (2007).