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by kartikkumar 4520 days ago
Awesome result. I think it's vitally important to acknowledge achievements that happen in parallel with research at the LHC because otherwise we're going to miss a lot of very neat results. I don't know enough about particle physics to be able to comment on the techniques involved unfortunately, but I love reading about the progress that's being made.

For someone that Wikipedia's a lot of this stuff, does someone know if this type of spin asymmetry is in any sense related to CP violation? [1] As soon as I read the article I thought of CP violation and I'm assuming this is basically the "P" violation.

Finally, reading this article actually triggered a totally different question:

"Using the electron accelerator at Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, Virginia, the researchers shined 170 billion electrons on a target of liquid deuterium over 2 months in 2009."

Shined or shone? Turns out to be quite the discussion topic (e.g., [2][3][4])!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP_violation

[2] http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/shined.html

[3] http://grammarist.com/usage/shined-shone/

[4] http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2010/10/18/has-the-sun...
1 comments
alxprc 4520 days ago
As it says in the article, this is the discovery of parity, P, violation in a system where it's not been seen before. In a "nice" universe, one might expect mirror images to behave the same, but here they've discovered that interactions between electrons and quarks are different depending on the spin of the electron.

So, it's related to CP violation in the sense that it something "violates CP symmetry" if it's behaviour changes when you flip the charge and the parity of the system simultaneous. Here, they only flip the parity.

link