10 Facts About CP violation

In particle physics, CP violation is a violation of CP-symmetry : the combination of C-symmetry and P-symmetry .

In 1956 Reinhard Oehme in a letter to Yang and shortly after, Ioffe, Okun and Rudik showed that the parity CP violation meant that charge conjugation invariance must be violated in weak decays.

Charge CP violation was more explicitly shown in experiments done by John Riley Holt at the University of Liverpool.

Kind of CP violation discovered in 1964 was linked to the fact that neutral kaons can transform into their antiparticles and vice versa, but such transformation does not occur with exactly the same probability in both directions; this is called indirect CP violation.

However, this raised the question of why CP violation did not extend to the strong force, and furthermore, why this was not predicted by the unextended Standard Model, despite the model's accuracy for "normal" phenomena.

Related searches

Reason why such a complex phase causes CP violation is not immediately obvious, but can be seen as follows.

Explanations which do not involve CP violation are less plausible, since they rely on the assumption that the matter–antimatter imbalance was present at the beginning, or on other admittedly exotic assumptions.

The first of these, involving the Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix in the quark sector, has been observed experimentally and can only account for a small portion of the CP violation required to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry.

The third source of CP violation is the Pontecorvo–Maki–Nakagawa–Sakata matrix in the lepton sector.

CP violation described complete CPT reflections of events on each side of what he called the "initial singularity".