Overview of the BTeV program

Abstract

BTeV is a dedicated experiment to carry out precision studies of CP violation, mixing, and rare decays of beauty and charm hadrons in the forward direction at the Fermilab Tevatron Collider. The detector is designed to have excellent particle identification for charged and neutral hadrons and photons, excellent mass and decay time resolutions, and a trigger system capable of selecting both hadronic and leptonic final states using detached vertices at the lowest level of the trigger. Some specific goals of the experiment include precision measurements of the CKM angles γ using B s→D s ±K ∓ (and other methods), α using B 0→ρπ, and the important but small CP asymmetry in the final state B s→ψη′. We discuss the performance of BTeV for the first of these methods after giving an overview of the detector.