CP violation
Violación de la simetría CP
- Date
- 1964 · confidence high
- Place
- Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, United States
- Credited to
- James Cronin; Val Fitch; James Christenson; René Turlay
- People
- 👤 James Cronin1931–2016👤 René Turlay1932–2002👤 Val Logsdon Fitch1923–2015
- Field
- Cosmos & Earth
What was discovered
Long-lived neutral kaons occasionally decay into two pions, violating the combined charge-parity symmetry that was thought to be exact. It implies that physical laws distinguish matter from antimatter and the direction of time.
Nobel Prize for Cronin and Fitch in 1980. Kobayashi and Maskawa explained the phenomenon in 1973 with six quarks.
What it led to
- Sakharov conditions for matter-antimatter asymmetry (1967)
- CKM matrix and the third generation of quarks
- B-meson factories (BaBar, Belle)
- Search for CP violation in neutrinos
Built on
- Parity violation in the weak interaction1956-1957
- Physics of neutral kaons (Gell-Mann, Pais)
- Proton accelerators (AGS)