Physicists announce antimatter discoveryBy Steve Koppes Mother
Nature likes matter better than antimattera preference
physicists technically refer to as charge-parity violation.
First observed in 1964 by James Cronin and Val Fitch, the
indirect CP violation they studied won them the 1980 Nobel Prize
in physics. Since then, theorists have worked to devise a model
of physics that could account for CP violation, but there was no
independent evidence to test the models against. Nothing, that
is, until Wednesday, Feb. 24, when Chicago graduate student
Peter Shawhan announced at a Fermilab seminar the discovery of
direct CP violation, an entirely new type of inequality between
matter and antimatter. Its an uncharted territory, said Bruce
Winstein, the Samuel Allison Distinguished Service Professor in
Physics, who headed up the 21-year effort that led to the
discovery. For 34 years weve had one measurement of CP
violation, just one manifestation of it. This is the first new
one since that time. In 1964 at Brookhaven