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BES III Publishes 500th Paper

By Heidi Opdyke Email Heidi Opdyke

Jocelyn Duffy

The Beijing Spectrometer (BESIII) Experiment hit a landmark of 500 publications on Oct. 13, something its collaborators celebrated. Among the scientists is Carnegie Mellon University's Roy Briere.

Infographic shows a bar chart with the increase of publications from 2010 to 2023 in Physical Review Letters, Nature and Nature Physics and other publications.
14 Years of Research: Collaborators for the BESIII experiment, a detector upgrade to the Beijing Electron-Positron Collider II, have published 500 journal articles since 2010.

Briere, a professor of physics, has been a part of the particle physics experiment at the Institute of High Energy since 2008, just before data collection began. As a standing member of the publications committee, he has read many of the articles written by the more than 600 collaborators from 85 institutions.

BESIII — sometimes called a tau-charm factory — spent several years collecting data focused on well-known hadrons containing charm quarks and also special data runs for tau leptons. It then shifted to "energy scans" designed to study new exotic hadronic states.

"We spend a lot of time studying hadrons. We knew it was a possibility, but it's worked out incredibly well," Briere said. He added that for the next two years BESIII will refocus again on studying charm quarks.