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PICKED UP: The 2008 Nobel prize in physics
NEWS: Visit of the Slovenian Ambassador to Japan
 
The Belle experiment is a complex detector of subatomic particles, stationed at the electron-positron collider KEKB in Japanese centre KEK in Tsukuba. The basic objective of the international group of physicists performing the measurements with the detector, is to understand the difference between particle and anti-particle decays - the so called CP violation. This difference is one of the reasons for a complete domination of matter over antimatter in the Universe.

In collisions of electrons and their antiparticles, positrons, in the KEKB accelerator, B meson pairs are created. These particles consist of b quarks and lighter u or d quarks. With incredibly accurate measurements of B and anti-B meson decays, the Belle group succeeded in measuring slight differences in both decays. The numerous measurements of CP violation in the B meson system, that were made by Belle and BaBar (Stanford, USA), confirmed the predictions of theoretical physicists M. Kobayashi and T. Masakawa. Both scientists received a Nobel prize in physics in 2008.

The international collaboration Belle consists of about 370 scientists from 14 different countries. 12 of these are physicists from Institute Jozef Stefan and universities in Ljubljana , Maribor and Nova Gorica.

From the beginning of the data collection in 2000, the physicists from Belle made numerous high profile measurements. They were described in more than 300 papers published in the most distinguished international scientific journals.
Some of them are briefly described on this site.