Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editors' Acknowledgments
- Photographs of the Symposium
- Abbreviations and Acronyms
- Mathematical Notation
- Part One Introduction
- Part Two Quarks and Leptons
- 4 From the Psi to Charmed Mesons: Three Years with the SLAC–LBL Detector at SPEAR
- 5 The Discovery of the Tau Lepton
- 6 The Discovery of the Upsilon, Bottom Quark, and B Mesons
- 7 The Discovery of CP Violation
- 8 Flavor Mixing and CP Violation
- Part Three Toward Gauge Theories
- Part Four Accelerators, Detectors, and Laboratories
- Part Five Electroweak Unification
- Part Six The Discovery of Quarks and Gluons
- Part Seven Personal Overviews
- Index
7 - The Discovery of CP Violation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Editors' Acknowledgments
- Photographs of the Symposium
- Abbreviations and Acronyms
- Mathematical Notation
- Part One Introduction
- Part Two Quarks and Leptons
- 4 From the Psi to Charmed Mesons: Three Years with the SLAC–LBL Detector at SPEAR
- 5 The Discovery of the Tau Lepton
- 6 The Discovery of the Upsilon, Bottom Quark, and B Mesons
- 7 The Discovery of CP Violation
- 8 Flavor Mixing and CP Violation
- Part Three Toward Gauge Theories
- Part Four Accelerators, Detectors, and Laboratories
- Part Five Electroweak Unification
- Part Six The Discovery of Quarks and Gluons
- Part Seven Personal Overviews
- Index
Summary
This opportunity to discuss the discovery of CP violation has forced me to go back and look at old notebooks and records. It amazes me that they are rather sloppy and very rarely are there any dates on them. Perhaps this is because I was not in any sense aware that we were on the verge of an important discovery. In the first reference I list some of the literature on this subject, which provides different perspectives on the discovery. I begin with a review of some of the important background that is necessary to place the discovery of CP violation in proper context.
Precursors
The story begins with the absolutely magnificent paper of Gell-Mann and Pais published in early 1955. Each time I read it, it gives me goose bumps such as I experience while listening to the first movement of Beethoven's Archduke Trio. They gave the paper a very formal title, “Behavior of Neutral Particles under Charge Conjugation,” but they knew in the end that this was something that concerned experiment. So the last paragraph reads:
At any rate, the point to be emphasized is this: a neutral boson may exist which has a characteristic θ0 mass but a lifetime ≠ τ and which may find its natural place in the present picture as the second component of the θ0 mixture.
One of us, (M. G.-M.), wishes to thank Professor E. Fermi for a stimulating discussion.
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- Information
- The Rise of the Standard ModelA History of Particle Physics from 1964 to 1979, pp. 114 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997
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