Physics

Research Interests:

Professor Smith's research interests are in experimental high energy physics, specifically decays of B mesons and search for supersymmetric particles.

Professor Smith's research interests are in experimental high energy physics. As a member of the CLEO collaboration (Cornell), he was a primary author of several measurements of rare B meson decays. Among these was the first observation of the decays B -> pipi and B -> Kpi, which are crucial for CP violation measurements at B Factories, and the discovery of the decay B->eta'K with a rate much larger than had been expected. Until 2010 he was involved in the BaBar experiment, running at the SLAC B-Factory PEP II. The premier result in 2001 was the first observation of CP violation in B decays and first significant measurement of the quantity sin 2beta. A measurement of significant CP violation in the decay eta'K0 was published in 2006 and improved in 2009. A difference between the value of sin 2beta in the two measurements would be a signal of physics beyond the Standard Model. He is now involed in the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Colllider (LHC) at CERN, searching for evidence of supersymmetric particles.

Selected Publications:

1. "Charmless Hadronic B Meson Decays", Hai-Yang Cheng and James G. Smith, Annu. Rev. Nucl. Part. Sci. {59}, 215-243 (2009).
2. "Measurement of time dependent CP asymmetry parameters in B0 meson decays to omegaKs, eta'K0, and pi0Ks, B. Aubert et al. (BABAR Collaboration), Phys. Rev. D79, 052003 (2009).
3. "Two-body B Meson Decays to eta and eta' -- Observation of B->eta'K", B.H. Behrens et al. (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 80, 3710 (1998).
4. "Observation of B0 Decays to Two Charmless Mesons", M. Battle et al. (CLEO Collaboration), Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 3922 (1993).