The BABAR Collaboration BABAR, the detector for the SLAC PEP-II asymmetric e + e − B Factory operating at the Υ (4S) resonance, was designed to allow comprehensive studies of CP -violation in B-meson decays. Charged particle tracks are measured in a multi-layer silicon vertex tracker surrounded by a cylindrical wire drift chamber. Electromagnetic showers from electrons and photons are detected in an array of CsI crystals located just inside the solenoidal coil of a superconducting magnet. Muons and neutral hadrons are identified by arrays of resistive plate chambers inserted into gaps in the steel flux return of the magnet. Charged hadrons are identified by dE/dx measurements in the tracking detectors and in a ring-imaging Cherenkov detector surrounding the drift chamber. The trigger, data acquisition and data-monitoring systems , VME-and network-based, are controlled by custom-designed online software. Details of the layout and performance of the detector components and their associated electronics and software are presented.

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We report the first measurement of the branching fraction f(00) for Gamma(4S) --> B(0)B(0). The data sample consists of 81.7 fb(-1) collected at the Gamma(4S) resonance with the BABAR detector at the SLAC PEP-II asymmetric-energy e(+)e(-) storage ring. Using partial reconstruction of the decay B(0) --> D(*+) l(-)nu(l) in which only the charged lepton and the soft pion from the decay D(*+) --> D(0)pi(+) are reconstructed, we obtain f(00) = 0.487 +/- 0.010(stat) +/- 0.008(syst). Our result does not depend on the branching fractions of B(0) --> D(*+)l(-)nu(l) and D(*+) --> D(0)pi(+) decays, on the ratio of the charged and neutral B meson lifetimes, nor on the assumption of isospin symmetry.

This paper deals with non-overlapping constraints between convex polytopes. Non-overlapping detection between fixed objects is a fundamental geometric primitive that arises in many applications. However from a constraint perspective it is natural to extend the previous problem to a non-overlapping constraint between two objects for which both positions are not yet fixed. A first contribution is to present theorems for convex polytopes which allow coming up with general necessary conditions for non-overlapping. These theorems can be seen as a generalization of the notion of compulsory part which was introduced in 1984 by Lahrichi and Gondran [6] for managing non-overlapping constraint between rectangles. Finally, a second contribution is to derive from the previous theorems efficient filtering algorithms for two special cases: the non-overlapping constraint between two convex polygons as well as the non-overlapping constraint between d-dimensional boxes.

We present the result of a search for the charmless two-body baryonic decay B 0 →pp ¯in a sample of 88 million ⌼(4S)→BB ¯decays collected by the BABAR detector at the SLAC PEP-II asymmetric-energy B Factory. We use Cherenkov radiation to identify protons cleanly, and determine the signal yield with a maximum-likelihood fit technique using kinematic and topological information. We find no evidence for a signal and place a 90% confidence-level upper limit of B(B 0 →pp ¯)Ͻ2.7ϫ10 Ϫ7 .