SuperB is a high-luminosity electron

Electron

The electron is a subatomic particle with a negative elementary electric charge. It has no known components or substructure; in other words, it is generally thought to be an elementary particle. An electron has a mass that is approximately 1/1836 that of the proton...

-positron

Positron

The positron or antielectron is the antiparticle or the antimatter counterpart of the electron. The positron has an electric charge of +1e, a spin of ½, and has the same mass as an electron...

 collider

Collider

A collider is a type of a particle accelerator involving directed beams of particles.Colliders may either be ring accelerators or linear accelerators.-Explanation:...

 that will be dedicated to elucidating new physics through precision studies of rare or suppressed decays. The collider will be built near Rome

Rome

Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...

, Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

, under the supervision of Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare

Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare

The Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare is the coordinating institution for nuclear, particle and astroparticle physics in Italy. It was founded on the 8th of August 1951, to further the nuclear physics research tradition initiated by Enrico Fermi in Rome, in the 1930s...

 (the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, INFN). The title SuperB refers to the fact that the collider is expected to produce very large quantities of B meson

B meson

B mesons are mesons composed of a bottom quark or bottom antiquark and either an up , down , strange or charm quark . The combination of a bottom antiquark and a top quark is not thought to be possible because of the top quark's short lifetime...

s.

Purpose

The designers hope that SuperB will help to provide evidence about the flavour (particle physics) sector of the Standard Model

Standard Model

The Standard Model of particle physics is a theory concerning the electromagnetic, weak, and strong nuclear interactions, which mediate the dynamics of the known subatomic particles. Developed throughout the mid to late 20th century, the current formulation was finalized in the mid 1970s upon...

 SuperB is intended to give further information about any new physics found by the Large Hadron Collider

Large Hadron Collider

The Large Hadron Collider is the world's largest and highest-energy particle accelerator. It is expected to address some of the most fundamental questions of physics, advancing the understanding of the deepest laws of nature....

. It may also be able to check for violations of CP violation

CP violation

In particle physics, CP violation is a violation of the postulated CP-symmetry: the combination of C-symmetry and P-symmetry . CP-symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle were interchanged with its antiparticle , and left and right were swapped...

, which may contribute to an understanding of why the universe is full of matter

Matter

Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...

 and not antimatter

Antimatter

In particle physics, antimatter is the extension of the concept of the antiparticle to matter, where antimatter is composed of antiparticles in the same way that normal matter is composed of particles...

. Accepted physical theory indicates that at the Big Bang

Big Bang

The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model that explains the early development of the Universe. According to the Big Bang theory, the Universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state which expanded rapidly. This rapid expansion caused the young Universe to cool and resulted in...

 equal quantities of matter and antimatter were created. However, when matter and antimatter meet they annihilate

Annihilation

Annihilation is defined as "total destruction" or "complete obliteration" of an object; having its root in the Latin nihil . A literal translation is "to make into nothing"....

 one another, so we should expect the universe to be empty. Physicists believe that CP violation may account for the discrepancy, and the designers hope that SuperB may be able to throw light on the question. They expect that SuperB will be able to make much more precise checks for CP violation than has been possible in the past.

SuperB should make it possible to observe matter and antimatter coexisting much as they did in the first moments of the universe, by means of the uncertainty principle

Uncertainty principle

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, can be simultaneously known...

. Unfortunately this situation is very unstable, and lasts for only a very brief time, but it is hoped to be able to take billions of quick glimpses, and thus build up a picture of what is happening.