Bepcii and Besiii
The Beijing Electron Collider has been upgraded (BEPCII) to a two-ring collider with a design luminosity of $1 \times 10^{33}$cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ at a center-of-mass energy of 3.78 GeV. It will operate between 2 and 4.6 GeV in the center of mass. With this luminosity, the BESIII detector will be able to collect, for example, 10 billion $J/\psi$ events in one year of running. This will be a unique facility in the world opening many physics opportunities. BEPCII and BESIII are both currently being commissioned, first events have been obtained, and data taking will take place in fall 2008.
BES3 time-of-flight monitoring system
Abstract A Time-of-Flight (TOF) monitoring system has been developed for BES3. The light source is a 442–443 nm laser diode, which is stable and provides a pulse width as narrow as 50 ps and a peak power as large as 2.6 W. Two optical-fiber bundles with a total of 512 optical fibers, including spares, are used to distribute the light pulses to the TOF counters. The design, operation, and performance of the system are described.
Nonsingular multidimensional cosmologies with Lobachevsky spatial sections
Examples of nonsingular cosmological models are presented on the basis of exact solutions to multidimensional gravity equations. These examples involve pure imaginary scalar fields, or, in other terms, “phantom” fields with an unusual sign of the kinetic term in the Lagrangian. We show that, with such fields, hyperbolic nonsingular models with a cosmological bounce (unlike spherical and spatially flat models) emerge without special relations among the integration constants, i.e., without fine tuning. In such models, the extra-dimension scale factors as well as scalar fields evolve smoothly between different finite asymptotic values. Examples of theories which create phantom scalar fields are obtained from string-inspired multidimensional field models and from theories of gravity in integrable Weyl space-times.