William T. Ford
Professor. Ph.D. Princeton University, 1967.
Professor Ford is an experimentalist in elementary particle physics. He
currently collaborates in the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment
operating at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)
laboratory in Switzerland, and in the BaBar experiment at the SLAC
National Accelerator Laboratory in California. The goals of this
research are to elucidate the elementary interactions of quarks and
leptons. The BaBar experiment has produced a rich variety of
findings about B mesons, charm mesons and baryons, and tau
leptons. It is designed particularly for the study of CP
symmetry violation in B meson decays. The CMS experiment is
exploring the new energy frontier opened up with the advent of
the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Professor Ford in collaboration with CU faculty colleagues and the
group's undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs working in
CMS investigate multi-lepton, and heavy-flavored multi-jet
signatures for new particles, such as those predicted by the
SUperSYmmetry theory. The group's physics interests at BaBar
include a search for
B meson decays to the relatively rare "charmless" final
states. As members of the CLEO and BaBar collaborations they have
discovered a number of new modes, and studied their CP
symmetry violation properties.
The group's detector efforts have centered mainly on tracking devices:
drift chambers for the MAC and Mark II experiments at SLAC, a large
drift tube system that was planned for SSC, the BaBar drift chamber,
and the CMS silicon pixel and strip detectors.
Physics interests over the years include weak interaction properties
as measured by neutrino interactions, and by the lifetimes,
branching fractions, and decay dynamics of weakly decaying
particles.
Professor Ford was a recipient of the 2006 W. K. H. Panofsky Prize
awarded by the American Physical Society.
Selected Publications
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"Measurement of Rates for Muonless Deep Inelastic Neutrino and
Antineutrino Interactions",
HPWF collaboration; B. Aubert et
al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 32, 1457 (1974).
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"Lifetime of Particles Containing b Quarks," MAC collaboration;
E. Fernandez et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 51, 1022 (1983).
-
"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).
-
"Observation of CP Violation in B-->eta'K0 Decays", BaBar
Collaboration, B. Aubert et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 031801
(2007).