Bye Bye BaBar April 11, 2008
Posted by gordonwatts in physics life.trackback
BaBar closed down the other day. Well, the long running PEP-II collider shut down, and BaBar depended on it for its collisions. The shutdown came a bit earlier than planed due to the science budget cuts.
BaBar has had a long career. If you are curious about its legacy just check out the 528 or so published papers that can be found on SPIRES. It will be missed!
528 papers?! Amazing. For comparison, I checked also Belle and 2 RHIC experiments (STAR, and PHENIX) — all of which started running somewhere around summer 2000:
Belle: 362
STAR: 387
Phenix: 300
If we believe spires, Babar is either an “upward fluctuation” or ~50% more productive than it’s peer group.
Mike — what did you use for the publish criteria? I just used PS P… I thought that number was pretty high, but in the few I scanned it looked like Spires was returning the right things. What I didn’t do, however, was go look at the BaBar web site where they probably have a list of published papers!
Hmm, I just replaced “babar” in your posted URL with belle, star, and phenix. Looking at STAR as an example, we have 108 papers in our collaboration database, and 387 in spires — I would wager the entire difference is in conference proceedings.