A light earthquake (magnitude 4.6), which woke me up a bit after 6 am local this morning, helped to again focus my sense of location: I’m in Japan, at KEK. Already last night, as I was gliding into Narita Airport for an unusually smooth approach with a view of Mt Fuji in the dusk, I was slowly beginning to change gears, physics wise. From high energy colliders at the Terascale I’m switching to low energy, extremely high rate experiments for the next few days: Precision measurements at Super Flavor Factories.
Combining results from different experiments, at different energies and with different particles, has been a very successful strategy in particle physics. Measurements at high energy hadron colliders, the measurements at LEP and the precision study of the flavor sector at the B factories have given us the understanding of the Standard Model that we currently have. And we have every reason to expect that this strategy will also be the best path to fully understand the physics beyond the Standard Model. So while we are all watching the LHC with big excitement and anticipation, it is important to think ahead and work towards a next generation of high energy lepton colliders as well as towards new experiments in flavor physics with unprecedented luminosity. So here I am, at KEK at the Belle-II collaboration meeting. Over the next three days, we’ll discuss the physics of this new experiment, and focus on the technological challenges to be overcome in the next few years to prepare for a start of data taking in 2014. Again, some intense days are ahead of me!
