Do a physics experiment. Now take that experiment, change all the particles to antiparticles, and reflect the entire apparatus around some fixed plane. If you get an equivalent result, we say that the experiment preserves charge/parity symmetry, or CP for short. Most mid-century physicists originally assumed that CP would be a good symmetry of nature — switching matter with antimatter also requires switching left with right, but why should left-handed particles behave any differently than right-handed antiparticles? But in the 1960’s Cronin and Fitch showed that it was violated by the decays of neutral kaons, for which they picked up a Nobel Prize in 1980.
Since then, studying CP violation has been a fruitful pursuit for particle physicists. The decay of various quarks into each other generically violates CP (as shown by Kobayashi and Maskawa, Nobel 2008), so searching for CP violation gives us a lot of leverage when we try to map out the dynamics of particles in the Standard Model. Which is why it was big news today when CERN announced that the LHCb experiment has observed CP violation in a brand-new system, decays of the Bs meson. (Here’s the paper.) It’s only the fourth known particle to have CP-violating decays, joining the kaon, the D meson, and the regular B meson. (The subscript s means there is a strange quark involved.) A brand-new way to study a mysterious subatomic process, learn more about the Standard Model, and launch an ambitious search for new physics! Should be enough to get anyone excited.
But it’s not, of course — there are people out there who stubbornly resist the charms of precision electroweak particle physics. So it’s traditional to make an appeal to something nominally more sexy: the matter/antimatter asymmetry of the universe.
I’ve complained about this before, to little avail. The logic is as irresistible as it is faulty: the process of baryogenesis, by which matter came to dominate over antimatter, requires that there be CP violation in the early universe; we are studying CP violation here in the late universe; obviously, what we’re doing helps us understand the matter/antimatter asymmetry. But that’s only true if the kind of CP violation we are studying is actually somehow related to baryogenesis. Which, most experts believe, it is not.
Here’s a piece in Symmetry Breaking which makes the case against itself quite clearly. It starts with:
When the universe was less than a minute old, a tiny difference in the behavior of matter and antimatter led to the matter-dominated existence we experience today. Today, particle physicists on CERN’s LHCb collaboration announced that, for the first time, they have observed particles called strange beauty mesons, or B0s, contributing to this imbalance.
That seems pretty unambiguous: they are saying that physicists have observed a process that contributed to the matter/antimatter asymmetry. It’s only at the end of the article that they admit you’ve been duped:
However, the Standard Model predicts only a tiny portion of the amount of CP violation needed to explain the huge deficit of antimatter in the universe. While these results help scientists understand the mechanics of CP violation, the case of the missing antimatter remains unsolved. “We expected a certain amount of CP violation to be found in the strange beauty system,” says Pierluigi Campana, the LHCb spokesperson. “But finding the missing fraction of CP violation in the early universe will be new physics, which the Standard Model can’t predict.”
That’s the point: baryogenesis requires CP violation, and the Standard Model has CP violation, but almost everyone agrees that the Standard Model by itself can’t possibly explain baryogenesis. But it can explain the new results from LHCb. Chances are extremely high that the CP violation observed at CERN has nothing at all to do with the asymmetry of matter and antimatter. But who wants an inconvenient fact to get in the way of a good story?
What’s going on here is exactly the same bait-and-switch syndrome that’s responsible for the “God Particle” name, or selling a cosmology book by pretending it’s about why there is something rather than nothing, or mixing up time-reversal violation with the arrow of time. I got in trouble for complaining about that last one, too, with folks who thought I was denigrating a good piece of experimental science. But it’s quite the opposite: I’m saying that the truth is interesting enough, there’s no need to try to sell it via dubious connections with something that supposedly is more marketable!
The Higgs boson, modern cosmology, time-reversal invariance, CP violation — these are really interesting topics. It’s our duty to sell them and explain them at the same time; not do the former at the cost of the latter. It doesn’t do any good if people think that what we do is interesting, but only because we’ve misled them about what that actually is. The good folks at LHCb have every reason to be extremely proud that they’ve discovered a new system that violates CP, and launched a new way to study Standard Model physics and hopefully look for phenomena that stretch beyond that. They don’t need to hitch their wagon to the baryogenesis star.
There is always Physicists Confirm They Have Found and Killed the God Particle
Sean, just a small note:
“Do a physics experiment. Now take that experiment, change all the particles to antiparticles, and reflect the entire apparatus around some fixed plane.”
Not a fixed plane, but a fixed point in space (coordinate origin). Parity means reversing all three axes (x, y and z), while reflecting around some fixed plane means reversing only one of the axes (the one orthogonal to the plane). In CP you want to do the former, not the latter.
Best, 🙂
Marko
How do we know CP symmetry is violated as opposed to locally broken?
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I couldn’t possibly agree more.
@Marko
Reversing two coordinates is just a rotation, so reflecting about a point is the same as reflecting about a plane and then rotating about a normal to that plane. Since there’s no preferred direction, reflecting about a plane is the same as flipping parity.
I think.
A priori, Couldn’t the measurement have come out in wild disagreement with the SM and get a value of cp violation that did have some berring on baryogenisis? Or had that possibility already been excluded?
Dear Sean,
Perhaps you’ll find it interesting, the title is quite intriguing “Entropy law linked to intelligence, say researchers”:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22261742
Best,
Marek
Sean Carroll,
could you tell me if the following is true? I’ve been trying to wrap my head around it:
“99% of the mass of an atom comes from energy; the energy of the quarks & of the massless gluons…”
MKS — that’s basically true, although it’s tricky. Add up the mass of the individual quarks inside a proton or neutron, you only get to about 1% of its total mass. The rest comes from effects of QCD. See here:
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2013/03/18/what-the-god-particle-hath-wrought/#comment-7295910552604252209
Beautifully put.
Thanks for the link to the Krauss’ interview, which I will surely read! But I note in browsing that he seems to respond to such a description, a description I apriori would have thought were apt, by describing the situation to be up for grabs:
“Even if you accept this argument that nothing is not nothing, you have to acknowledge that nothing is being used in a philosophical sense. But I don’t really give a damn about what “nothing” means to philosophers; I care about the “nothing” of reality. And if the “nothing” of reality is full of stuff, then I’ll go with that.
But I don’t have to accept that argument, because space didn’t exist in the state I’m talking about, and of course then you’ll say that the laws of quantum mechanics existed, and that those are something. But I don’t know what laws existed then. In fact, most of the laws of nature didn’t exist before the universe was created; they were created along with the universe, at least in the multiverse picture.”
It is punting on remaining laws I take it, but Krauss seems to be differentiating between “the universe” and the multiverse. So a little bit of this (an explanation in several senses), and a little bit of that (… but not in all senses). He also claims a “hook” previously, so admits that the book is not without this ambiguity I take it.
I second Torbjorn. I really enjoyed that interview with Krauss. Have to admit that I had objections to Krauss’ book due to the title, but after reading that interview I think I’ll reconsider my view.
I think it’s true (and quite obvious) that you need a “hook” to get people’s attention. And maybe it’s not always fair to blame the author if individuals start to make claims without even reading the book/article (guilty as charged here) – giving that the title itself is not provoking any onslaught other than intellectual.
Thanks 🙂
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Sean Carroll,
ty for the response — reality is truly awesome :3
“but almost everyone agrees that the Standard Model by itself can’t possibly explain baryogenesis”
Can someone please point me to a reference where this point is elucidated?
Jay– Mark wrote about this on Cosmic Variance a while back.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2008/07/29/matter-v-antimatter-ii-electroweak-baryogenesis/
Or for more technical details:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9803479
The reason the media tends to sensationalize science is that emotions attract attention. I suppose that’s a tolerable tradeoff for increasing the scientific literacy of laypeople.
.
As a layperson, I didn’t get taken in by the “God particle” stuff. My first take on the Higgs particle was “this is something that will help complete the Standard Model,” and then after I read a bit further, “this particle is hypothesized to arise from the Higgs field, which will provide an explanation of inertia.” Now _that,_ in and of itself, is fascinating.
.
If one needed a “human interest” story about the Higgs discovery, it could easily have been found in the videos of the conference, showing the large numbers of scientists around the world whose cooperation made the discovery possible, and comparing their behavior and comportment to those of the majority of U.S. Representatives and Senators.
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Has it been proven that there is more matter in the universe than anti-matter. Is what we currently are able to see in itself proof? Doesn’t anti-matter exist all around us in our world; as in particle decays. Don’t we use PET scans? If there is a balance in the wider universe of matter, anti-matter, energy; where is the anti-matter? Why assume it does not exist?