Week of October 23

My mentor still wasn't at Siena this week, so I answered some more of the study questions and continued learning Python from Emma.

Here are the study questions I answered:

What is an electron? What is a muon?

Electrons and muons are both classified as leptons.

Electrons are subatomic particles with a negative electric charge. They play an essential role in electricity, magnetism, and thermal conductivity, and they also participate in gravitational, electromagnetic, and weak interactions. Electrons have properties of both particles and waves, and can collide with other particles and can be diffracted like light.

Electrons radiate or absorb energy in the form of photons when accelerated. The antiparticle of an electron is a positron (identical to the electron except with an opposite charge).

A muon is an elementary particle similar to the electron, although it has a much larger mass. It has an electric charge of -1.

Where and when did the BaBar particle physics experiment run?

The BaBar particle physics experiment ran from 1999 to 2008 at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory at Stanford.

At the BaBar experiment, what kinds of particle beams did they collide?

BaBar studies the particles produced in collisions between electrons and positrons.