In February of this year a new particle collider, SuperKEKB, located at the KEK laboratory in Tsukuba, achieved its “first turns”, a major milestone in preparing for collisions in 2017. This is the newest frontier “particle-collider” to go online since the LHC at CERN in Geneva.

The Belle II detector, located at the SuperKEKB interaction point, will be used to probe new physics at energy scales well beyond the reach of the LHC. By examining flavour changing processes of beauty quarks, charm quarks and tau leptons produced in e+e− collisions we will look to solve some of the mysteries of the universe: the striking mass and coupling hierarchy of elementary particles, the cosmological matter-antimatter asymmetry, and how neutrinos got a mass. New interactions and yet unseen particles must exist to explain these phenomena.

In this seminar, I shall discuss the physics driving the Belle II experiment at SuperKEKB, and what we hope to achieve by charting the intensity frontier.