Seminar on CP and CPT Violation

NUCLEAR and PARTICLE PHYSICS SEMINAR

Tuesday, April 13th, SC 1C13, 4:00pm

Jim Napolitano
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
"Violations of Fundamental Symmetries in Nature:
The Past, Present, and Future of CP and CPT"

The discovery of parity violation in 1957 opened the door to a new way of thinking about nature. No longer could people assume that a "mirror image" of nature behaved the sameas nature itself. When, some years later, the combined symmetry of CP was shown to be broken, then we knew that even matter and antimatter were fundamentally different. Still, sound theoretical arguments "proved" the CPT theorem, which says that combining time reversal with CP was a good symmetry. Now however, even CPT is under attack by proponents of "superstrings".I will discuss these symmetries and some of the experimental history. We will also talk about a new experimental result from FermiLab on the nature of CP violations in Kaon decay. We will conclude with a look at upcoming experiments at DAPhNE and possibly in Hall D at Jefferson Lab.


Department of Physics
Last modified: Sun Apr 11 11:11:08 EDT 1999