Physicists have been racking their brains for a long time over the violation of combined parity in the decay of certain particles. English theoretical physicist Mark Hadley puts forward a very extravagant hypothesis explaining the reasons for this phenomenon: in his opinion, we just ended up in the wrong place.
According to physicist Mark Hadley, it is precisely those particles and antiparticles (neutral K-mesons, B-mesons and D-mesons) that are most sensitive to the intragalactic field, in the decays of which even the combined parity is not preserved.
Until the middle of the last century, theorists assumed and experimenters guaranteed that absolutely all transformations of elementary particles are invariant with respect to mirror symmetry. This means that any process with their participation will not change from reflection in a flat mirror, no matter how it is located in space, or, which is the same, from replacing the right with the left, and the left with the right. Physicists call this invariance parity conservation. It seems obvious and natural, since the distinction between right and left seems to be completely arbitrary. Of the four fundamental interactions - gravitational, electromagnetic, strong and weak - the first three really obey the law of conservation of parity, and completely and without exceptions. However, in weak interactions (for example,in the processes of beta decay of atomic nuclei) the parity is not conserved. We can say that transformations of particles, controlled by weak interaction, react to the difference between right and left. This feature was predicted theoretically in 1956 and was soon confirmed experimentally.
Napra … nale … in
Parity nonconservation in weak interactions literally fell on physicists' heads and was perceived as an unpleasant paradox. Theorists immediately suggested that the symmetry between the left and right still exists, but it does not manifest itself as "head-on" as previously thought. Several years before the discovery of parity nonconservation, several physicists hypothesized that the mirror image of any particle could be its antiparticle. This idea suggested that the parity conservation law could be rescued by requiring that specular reflection be accompanied by a transition to antiparticles. However, even this trick did not help. Already in 1964, American researchers James Cronin and Val Fitch, in experiments carried out at the variable gradient synchrotron at Brookhaven National Laboratory, showedthat long-lived neutral K-mesons decay with weak nonconservation of such a generalized (as physicists say, combined) parity. For this discovery, they received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980. And in 2001, the experiments BaBar at the Stanford Linear Accelerator (SLAC) and Belle at the Japanese Institute for High Energy (KEK) accelerator proved that the combined parity is also not conserved in the decays of neutral D-mesons and B-mesons.that in decays of neutral D-mesons and B-mesons the combined parity is also not conserved.that in decays of neutral D-mesons and B-mesons the combined parity is also not conserved.
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CP-inversion in physics is the simultaneous inversion of charge conjugation (denoted by the letter C, charge), which turns a particle into an antiparticle, and a parity inversion (P, parity), which mirrors the particle, swapping right and left. The strong and electromagnetic interactions with respect to the CP-inversion are symmetric (as physicists say, invariant), but the weak interaction is not, which is observed in some decay processes. In particular, neutral kaons (K-mesons consisting of an s-antiquark and a d- or u-quark) oscillate, that is, they turn into antiparticles and vice versa. The probabilities of transformation in the forward and reverse directions are not equal, and this indirectly indicates the violation of CP symmetry.
Bad place
According to the standard theory of elementary particles, parity nonconservation is a fundamental property of weak interactions. This is exactly what the physicist Mark Hadley of the British University of Warwick objects to. He admits that the weak interaction preserves parity, but we do not notice this, since … we are in the wrong place in the Universe. The Earth revolves around the Sun, which, along with other stars, moves around the center of our Galaxy. Both movements carry away space - time, distorting its metrics. The corrections caused by the Earth's orbital rotation are negligible, which cannot be said about the galactic rotation, in which hundreds of billions of stars participate. It creates a dedicated direction in space - the very direction where the vector of the galactic angular momentum looks. Therefore, the intragalactic space does not have mirror symmetry, so that it is not obliged to observe the transformation of elementary particles.
Hadley believes that the entrainment of space-time caused by the rotation of the Galaxy creates something like a force field that affects particles and antiparticles in different ways. But the influence does not manifest itself universally, but depends on the type of particles and the processes in which they participate. According to Hadley, the intragalactic field is most strongly felt by those particles in whose decays even the combined parity is not preserved.
Orient by galaxy
It follows from Hadley's hypothesis that the results of experiments designed to test parity conservation depend on where these experiments are performed. In a small spherical galaxy with a low angular momentum, parity would be preserved much better than on Earth, and somewhere in empty deep space, any specular reflections would not change anything at all. By the same logic, the parity conservation law would just burst at the seams near rapidly rotating neutron stars. Such is the relativism caused by the influence of gravitational effects on the transformation of elementary particles.
Hadley believes that this effect can be tested on Earth, already at the present time. To do this, it is necessary to see if the nature of parity violation does not change depending on the direction of the particles scattering with respect to the galactic rotation vector. Hadley even admits that the analysis of the data already accumulated in experiments on accelerators is enough for this. And if the effect is confirmed, it is quite possible that not only terrestrial, but also galactic coordinates will be on the drawings of future accelerators.
Alexey Levin