|
A team of UVic physicists has good reason to feel the glow from this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded last month to Professors Makoto Kobayashi (High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Japan) and Toshihide Maskawa (Kyoto University).
UVic principal investigator Dr. Michael Roney, together with Drs. Robert Kowalewski, Randall Sobie, Justin Albert and Swagato Banerjee (physics and astronomy) and their dedicated squad of graduate students, are part of the international BaBar collaboration based at Stanford and played a major role in the confirmation, in 2002, of the theoretical predictions made by the two Nobel laureates in 1972.
Immediately after the Big Bang, matter and antimatter were present in equal amounts, but now matter dominates the universe. For decades, physicists have believed that matter and antimatter behaved identically under the law of physics. Then, in the mid-1960s, a tiny but clear difference—an asymmetry—was detected between matter and antimatter. That is what the Kobayashi-Maskawa theory successfully described mathematically.
“Antimatter is science, not fiction,” says Kowalewski, acting chair of UVic’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. “Antimatter is a sort of ‘mirror image’ of matter, and the mirror is cracked. The new Nobel laureates made a bold hypothesis about the origin of this asymmetry.
“Their theory required six quarks, and at that time only three had been discovered. The remaining three were subsequently found, yet the evidence that their theory correctly described the matter-antimatter asymmetry remained elusive. The precise pattern of asymmetries that flow from their theory still needed to be verified—or disproved—by experiment.”
This prediction was the motivation behind the construction of the BaBar experiment at Stanford. The UVic team helped build the device that tracks particles produced during subatomic collisions within a particle accelerator (somewhat similar to the set-up of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, of which UVic is also a key player) and analyze the resulting data, thereby helping to confirm the Kobayashi-Maskawa theory.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to a trio of researchers. Particle theorist Yoichiro Nambu (University of Chicago) received the other half of the prize for his work on broken symmetry in subatomic physics.
|
