CERN Experiment Clarifies Origin of CP Symmetry Violation Available to Purchase

Experimental and theoretical floodgates were opened in 1957 by the discovery that parity inversion (P) and charge conjugation (C) are not among nature's elite of inviolate symmetry transformations. By contrast, the even more surprising discovery of CP violation seven years later has been something of a disappointment. In the quarter‐century since James Cronin, Val Fitch, James Christenson and Rene Turlay at Princeton discovered that the decay of neutral K mesons is not precisely invariant under the combined operations of parity inversion and charge conjugation, CP violation has been seen in no other physical system. Nor have the experimenters been able to clarify the mechanism underlying this exotic asymmetry of the elementary particles.