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 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 in collaboration with Professor Jim Smith and the group's
undergraduate and graduate students and postdocs investigate 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 central drift chamber system that was planned for SSC, and
the main tracking chamber for BaBar.
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
-
"Measurement of Rates for Muonless
Deep Inelastic Neutrino and Antineutrino Interactions",
HPWF
collaboration; B. Aubert et al., Phys. Rev
Lett. 32, 1457 (1974).
-
"Lifetime of Particles Containing b
Quarks," MAC collaboration; E. Fernandez et al., Phys. Rev
Lett. 51, 1022 (1983).
-
"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).
-
"Observation of CP Violation in B-->eta'K0 Decays", BaBar Collaboration, B. Aubert et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 031801 (2007).