It was about quarter past seven on the evening of October 7, 2008, when the winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics were announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Researchers and engineers at Japan’s High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), a vast research facility 60 km northeast of Tokyo, celebrated the news, which included an award to one of their own. Makoto Kobayashi, professor emeritus of KEK and an associate of the facility for three decades控制工程网版权所有, and Toshihide Maskawa,

professor emeritus of Kyoto University won Nobel Prizes in physics for their discovery of the origin of broken symmetry, known as CP violationCONTROL ENGINEERING China版权所有, which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature. KEK has played a pivotal role in verifying the matter-antimatter asymmetry, successfully predicted by the Kobayashi-Maskawa theory almost 30 years after it was originally published in 1973.
　　The KEKB-factory is a charged particle accelerator and storage ring system for experimental validation of the CP violation model. It consists of an electron/positron injector (linear accelerator控制工程网版权所有, or Linac), a dual-ring accelerator控制工程网版权所有, and a Belle detector. The accelerator is an asymmetric double-ring collider控制工程网版权所有, with rings storing an 8-GeV electron beam and a 3.5-GeV positron beam. Beams run at nearly the speed of light in opposite directions through 3 km tunnels buried 11 m beneath the ground, and collide in the center of the Belle detector. The Belle detector record the process of B-meson decay. It was the Belle experiment that firmly established the validity of the Kobayashi-Maskawa theory of CP violation in 2002 and led to Kobayasi’s Nobel prize.

　　While running through the accelerator rings控制工程网版权所有, beams lose energy. Klystrons supply high power radio frequency energy to re-accelerate the charged particles. Source: Design News Japan
　　Accelerator control and EPICS
　　In the KEKB central control room, researchers and engineers monitor locations and sizes of beams, checking activ