B-meson oscillations at CDF

An article in this month's Physics Today magazine describes the CDF collaboration's measurement of Boscillations. The plot shown in the article is derived from a published plot of Penn post-doc, Aart Heijboer, working in Prof. Joe Kroll's group at the time.  This is one of the major results in hadron collider physics of the last 30 years.

Neutral Bs mesons oscillate between states B0s and B0s-bar, distinguished by whether the meson’s bottom-flavored quark is a b or b-bar. The CDF collaboration’s measured asymmetry, defined as the fractional difference between the number of decays that do not manifest flavor change and those that do, is plotted against the time between the meson’s creation and its decay. The data combine many oscillation periods. The best-oscillation-fit curve has a periodicity of 0.35 ps.