BABAR status and future plans

The BABAR experiment is a true international enterprise. Its members are 579 physicists from 75 institutions of 10 countries, nearly half of the collaboration is from USA and half from outside countries, mainly from Europe. The BABAR detector in Interaction Region 2 of PEPII has been in full operation since November 1999, after receiving its first beam in May 1999. The goals of the experiment are to perform a comprehensive study of CP violation in the Bd meson system, to carry out high-sensitivity searches for and measurements of rare B decays, and to make precision measurements in the charm and τ sectors. After the discovery in 1964 of the CP violation in the famous K meson Brookhaven experiment the mission of BABAR was originally focused on establishing CP violation in the b flavor sector. This goal was achieved in 2001 when BABAR has firstly observed CP violation in Bd decay, soon after confirmed by Belle. PEPII machine was performing particularly well in Run I, II and III delivering to BABAR before June 10, 2003 about 133 fb-1 of integrated luminosity. BABAR has shown a very high efficiency (97%) and has collected nearly 123 million B meson pairs at the Υ(4S) resonance and an additional 12 fb-1 taken 40 MeV below the resonance. The BABAR physics program is now focused on three main targets: - perform a comprehensive set of CP-violating asymmetries in B meson decays; - study of rare decay processes; - perform detailed studies as contribution to the understanding of the dynamics of processes involving heavy quarks. The first two goals focus on testing the Standard Model, measuring its parameters, and searching for the effects of new physics, while the third goal is designed to build a solid foundation by elucidating the interplay between electroweak and strong interactions in heavy quark processes. The paper presents the status of BaBar experiment after 4 years of run together with some of its physics achievements, future plans, possible physics goals toward the end of the present decade and upgrades to the detection