Bhabha Scattering - Uses

Uses

Bhabha scattering has been used as a luminosity monitor in a number of e+e- collider physics experiments. The accurate measurement of luminosity is necessary for accurate measurements of cross sections.

• Small-angle Bhabha scattering was used to measure the luminosity of the 1993 run of the Stanford Large Detector (SLD), with a relative uncertainty of less than 0.5%.
• Electron-positron colliders operating in the region of the low-lying hadronic resonances (about 1 GeV to 10 GeV), such as the Beijing Electron Synchrotron (BES) and the Belle and BaBar "B-factory" experiments, use large-angle Bhabha scattering as a luminosity monitor. To achieve the desired precision at the 0.1% level, the experimental measurements must be compared to a theoretical calculation including next-to-leading-order radiative corrections. The high-precision measurement of the total hadronic cross section at these low energies is a crucial input into the theoretical calculation of the anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the muon, which is used to constrain supersymmetry and other models of physics beyond the Standard Model.