Number 146 (Story #3), October 5, 1993 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein A B-MESON FACTORY WILL BE BUILT AT SLAC . After a long competition with its rival at Cornell, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center won the right to build a facility dedicated to producing B mesons. The study of the decay of B mesons, some theorists believe, will lead to a greater understanding of CP violation, an effect (the combined non-conservation of charge conjugation and parity in certain particle interactions) which may have been responsible for the apparent disparity between matter and antimatter in the universe. For the research to be practical, the B's must first be produced in large numbers in electron-positron collisions. At SLAC this will occur in a modified version of the existing accelerator. The four-year construction should cost about $177 million. (The New York Times, 5 Oct. 1993.)