CP violation

Uncommon card · No. 161193

In particle physics, CP violation is a violation of CP-symmetry (or charge conjugation parity symmetry): the combination of C-symmetry (charge conjugation symmetry) and P-symmetry (parity symmetry). CP-symmetry states that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle is interchanged with its antiparticle (C-symmetry) while its spatial coordinates are inverted ("mirror" or P-symmetry). CP violation is only observed in the weak interaction. The discovery of CP violation in 1964 in the decays of neutral kaons resulted in the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980 for its discoverers James Cronin and Val Fitch. CP violation was subsequently discovered in many other meson decays. In 2025, the LHCb experiment discovered CP violation in baryons. There is some evidence CP violation may occur in neutrino interactions. It is important to the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem and the strong CP problem, and in the study of weak interactions in particle physics. Under the CPT theorem, every CP violation...

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