• DevDave@piefed.social
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    2 days ago

    I thought Madam Wu’s experiment provided a starting point for explaining why the universe exists despite its best efforts to annihilate itself. Disclaimer, I have passing interest in physics but I have no formal education on any of it.

    • sbeak@sopuli.xyz
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      18 hours ago

      Yeah, CP violation is a big focus when it comes to the research of baryogenesis, the theoretical process that produced the baryon asymmetry! Her experiment established that parity symmetry (P) can be broken through weak interactions, and later experiments showed that the combined CP symmetry (charge conjugation + parity) can also be broken, again through weak force shenanigans.

      CP violation is one of the three Sakharov conditions (which were proposed by and named after Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov) of dynamic baryogenesis, as it would mean that matter and antimatter can behave differently in certain processes. If they behaved identically, no asymmetry would be produced and they would both annihilate. However, there was one extra baryon for every million antibaryons (we know this through measurements of the CMB and the quantities of light elements produced in Big Bang nucleosynthesis), and this slight difference allowed matter to dominate the universe.

    • naeap@sopuli.xyz
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      2 days ago

      Don’t know about that
      Can you provide me some more words to search for it or even a link?