My research is in experimental particle physics, also called high energy physics.  This branch of physics studies nature on the subatomic scale, using very high energy particles as probes.   Accelerators are usually used to produce the particles.

I am part of a large collaboration that is performing an experiment called  BaBar at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC).   The experiment studies the decays of B mesons produced in electron-positron collisions.  The PEP-II B-factory at SLAC makes it possible to obtain much larger numbers of B mesons than in the past, and because PEP-II has two storage rings it is able to collide beams of different energies.  By doing this, the B's are produced with sufficient momentum in the laboratory for them to travel a measurable distance before they decay.  This allows their proper lifetimes to be determined, so that time-dependent CP violating asymmetries can be measured.

Prior to BaBar, most of my research has been in the field of rare kaon decays.  Starting in 1984, I worked on experiments that studied the very rare decays of long-lived neutral kaons at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, using the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron (AGS).  The AGS provided a very high intensity proton beam that was used to produce a neutral beam (mostly neutrons and neutral kaons).  The final data for that program was taken in 1996.  While a number of publications came out of this program over the years, here are the citations of the papers that reported the final results:

D. Ambrose et al., “Improved Branching Ratio Measurement for the Decay K-long --> m+m-,”  Phys. Rev. Lett., 84, 1389(2000).

D. Ambrose et al., “New Limit on Muon and Electron Lepton Number Violation from  K-long -->  me,” Phys. Rev. Lett., 81, 5734(1998).

D. Ambrose et al., “First Observation of the Rare Decay Mode K-long --> e+e-,” Phys. Rev.  Lett., 81, 4309(1998).
 

My Ph.D. experiment was performed at Fermilab.  Its purpose was to study hadronic charm production.  The experiment measured the production of what are called prompt single muons.  Since most of these came from the decays of charmed particles, these measurements could be interpreted in terms of hadronic charm production.