GABRIELLA SCIOLLA, Associate
Professor of Physics; Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor
Research Interests
Sciolla's main goal is to study the physics that rules the interactions
between elementary particles and to understand its cosmological
implications. As an experimentalist, she studies the exotic and
unstable particles produced in high energy collisions between electrons
and positrons, and measures the tiny asymmetry between matter and
anti-matter in the final state. This asymmetry, known as "CP
violation," plays an important role in our understanding of
why the Universe is made of matter instead of anti-matter.
She is actively involved in the study of CP violation in the decays
of B mesons. The experiment, called BaBar, reconstructs the decays
of millions of B mesons produced at the SLAC asymmetric B factory,
PEP-II. The study of the decays of B mesons in final states containing
charmonium and neutral kaons provided one of the first unambiguous
observations of CP violation in the B system, and the first quantitative
test of the CP sector of the Standard Model of Particle Physics.
The current goal is to extend the CP violation measurements to new
channels that will allow researchers to probe for physics beyond
the Standard Model.
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Biographical Sketch
Sciolla received her Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Torino,
Italy, in 1996, with a thesis on the measurement of beauty baryon
lifetime in the DELPHI experiment at LEP (CERN). She pursued her
interest in B physics by joining the BaBar Collaboration as a SLAC
Research Associate at Stanford University. Sciolla came to MIT in
2000, as a Research Scientist first, and then as Pappalardo Fellow
in Physics. She joins the MIT faculty in the fall of 2003 as an
Assistant Professor of Physics.
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Selected Publications
"Measurement of the CP-violating amplitude sin(2ß),"
BaBar Collaboration (B. Aubert et al.), Phys.Rev.Lett.
89:201802 (2002).
"Observation of CP violation in the B0
meson system, BaBar Collaboration (B. Aubert et al.), Phys.Rev.Lett.
87:091801 (2001).
"The BaBar drift chamber," G. Sciolla et al.,
Nucl.Instrum.Meth.A 419:310-314 (1998).
"Determination of the average lifetime of B baryons,"
DELPHI Collaboration (P. Abreu et al.), Z.Phys.C 71:199-210
(1996).
"Lifetime and production rate of beauty baryons from Z0
decays," DELPHI Collaboration (P. Abreu et al.), Z.Phys.C
68:375-390 (1995).
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