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While scanning through items in our #rss-bot channel for today, I came upon an interesting article at phys.org CP violation or new physics?:
Over the past few years, multiple neutrino experiments have detected hints for leptonic charge parity (CP) violation—a finding that could help explain why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter. So far, matter-antimatter asymmetry cannot be explained by any physics theory and is one of the biggest unsolved problems in cosmology.
But now in a new study published in Physical Review Letters, physicists David V. Forero and Patrick Huber at Virginia Tech have proposed that the same hints could instead indicate CP-conserving "new physics," and current experiments would have no way to tell the difference.
Both possibilities—CP violation or new physics—would have a major impact on the scientific understanding of some of the biggest questions in cosmology. Currently, one of the most pressing problems is the search for new physics, or physics beyond the Standard Model, which is a theory that scientists know is incomplete but aren't sure exactly how to improve. New physics could potentially explain several phenomena that the Standard Model cannot, including the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem, as well as dark matter, dark energy, and gravity.
As the scientists show in the new study, determining whether the recent hints indicate CP violation or new physics will be very challenging. The main goal of the study was to "quantify the level of confusion" between the two possibilities. The physicists' simulations and analysis revealed that both CP violation and new physics have distributions centered at the exact same value for what the neutrino experiments measure—something called the Dirac CP phase. This identical preference makes it impossible for current neutrino experiments to distinguish between the two cases.
[...] "The trick is that the type of new physics we postulate in our paper manifests itself in the way in which neutrino oscillations are affected by the amount of earth matter through which the neutrino traverses," Huber said. "The more matter travelled through, the larger the effect of this type of new physics."
An abstract (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.031801 ) is available; full article is paywalled.
This is way outside my level of understanding, but I have seen references to CP violations before and find the concept fascinating Any Soylentils care to weigh in and explain what was found and what it may mean in terms that an educated but non-physicist layman might understand?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Grishnakh on Tuesday July 26 2016, @08:55PM
It's very simple:
In this universe, there's almost no "antimatter" and tons of "matter". But to balance this out, there's an alternate universe where this is reversed (except the names are swapped: from their perspective, what we call "antimatter" is "matter"). This is also the universe where humans are generally benevolent explorers who will create a peaceful federation of planets in a couple of centuries, whereas in our universe we're going to steal technology from some nearby aliens and then create a brutal empire, called the "Terran Empire". For proof, notice that goatees are extremely popular these days.