The BESIII collaboration 2018 Winter Meeting was held at Wuhan University (WHU), Wuhan, Hubei, China, from November 26 to 30, 2018. The academician Hong-Xing Xu, the dean of the School of Physics and Technology of Wuhan University, gave the welcome speech.
More than 200 scientists, engineers and students from 48 research institutions in China, Germany, Italy, the United States, Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands and elsewhere were gathered to present their latest work on the accelerator, detector, software, and analyses at BESIII. The attendees also discussed new membership applications to BESIII, the management of the collaboration, and data taking plans. More than eighty talks were presented. The collaboration has been studying the physics reach and potential of the accelerator and detector, for a program lasting another eight to ten years. A whitepaper documenting these studies will be made public in the near future.
Beijing Electron Positron Collider (BEPC) is the first large-scale science facility in China and began running in 1988. It was updated to BEPCII in 2009 and became an international leading accelerator facility on tau-charm energy. The Beijing Spectrometer III (BESIII) is the detector located at the collision point of BEPCII. A series of important results, including the accurate measurement of the mass of tau lepton, a precise measurement of the R value, the discoveries of a new resonance state X(1835) and “tetraquark candidate” Zc(3900) were achieved in the past 30 years. In recent years, significant progress has been made in the accurate measurement of the weak decays of charmed particles, hadron physics, and searches for new particles and physics beyond the Standard Model. Since its first data taking in 2009, BESIII has published 229 papers in peer-reviewed journals.
Two public lectures given by Prof. Wolfgang Kuehn and Prof. Haibo Li were arranged during the collaboration meeting, introducing particle physics and the history of BEPC/BES to the teachers and students in Wuhan University.
Xiaorui Lyu from UCAS was elected co-spokesperson of the collaboration, replacing Haiping Peng from USTC, who will now serve on the Executive Board advising the spokespersons. The BESIII collaboration welcomed Shandong Normal University from China as a new member. As of this meeting, the collaboration consists of 67 institutions from 14 countries. The next BESIII Workshop will be held at Hunan Normal University in March 2019.
