Indeed, Stanford has many, many achievements of that kind to celebrate. The basic question that the B Factory is designed to explore is the difference between matter and antimatter. Antimatter is the electrical mirror image of regular matter. Where an electron has a negative electrical charge, its antiparticle, the positron, has a positive electrical charge. Otherwise the two particles are identical.
Every regular particle possesses an antiparticle.
When a particle and its antiparticle collide, they disappear in a flash of pure energy. The discovery of antimatter raised the question of why the universe appears to be almost entirely made up of regular matter, containing little if any antimatter. After years of effort, physicists have found one subtle difference between particles and antiparticles. Violation of an effect called charge-parity reversal, or CP, makes it harder to transform ordinary particles into antiparticles than vice versa. Evidence to date, however, suggests that this effect is too small to explain the observed excess of normal matter.