Belle II resumes data taking after summer shutdown

The Belle II collaboration is back in action! After a scheduled summer shutdown, we successfully resumed data taking at the SuperKEKB accelerator in Japan on October 24 at around 18:00 CEST (01:00 AM Tsukuba local time). In the control room, ETP physicist Lea Reuter eagerly awaited the first collisions, ready to help collect data that may answer questions in flavor physics or uncover dark matter. Several ETP physicists will contribute to the 24/7 control room shifts in Tsukuba, Japan, in the coming days and weeks, working directly alongside the massive Belle II detector.

Additionally, more scientists from two KIT institutes, the Institute of Experimental Particle Physics (ETP) and the Institute for Information Processing Technology (ITIV), are currently involved as so-called "expert shifters”. While the control room shifters are responsible for the overall stability of data collection, including the safety of the detector, the expert shifters are specifically trained to address more complex issues related to the electromagnetic calorimeter and the FPGA-based first-level trigger system. These experts monitor detailed online displays from their offices in Karlsruhe, connected via fast internet and video messaging systems to the control room in Japan. PhD students Isabel Haide (physics) and Marc Neu (electrical engineering) are particularly excited about the new data. “We are currently in the final stages of deploying a new trigger algorithm for the electromagnetic calorimeter,” Haide adds. “This trigger, based on Graph Neural Networks, will allow photon reconstruction and identification in less than five microseconds. If everything goes according to plan, we will start operating the system as part of the Belle II trigger in less than two weeks.”

Contact: Prof. Torben Ferber