How to Tell Matter From Antimatter | CP Violation & The Ozma Problem

This video was made with the support of the Heising Simons Foundation.

This video is about the Ozma problem of distinguishing the chirality (ie left-handedness or right-handedness) of matter using weak interaction processes like beta decay (for example in uranium), or neutral kaon/k-meson decay. This is wrapped up in the phenomenon of CP violation, by which charge and parity are both violated by certain weak interaction processes - this enables antimatter to be unambiguously distinguished from matter, and left handed chirality from right handed.

REFERENCES

The Ozma Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Project
https://www.seti.org/seti-institute/project/details/early-seti-project-ozma-arecibo-message

Sean Carroll on CP Symmetry (& why we shouldn’t trot out baryogenesis all the time)
https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2010/06/04/marketing-cp-violation/

Electroweak CP Violation on Scholarpedia
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/CPviolationinelectroweakinteractions

The Wu Experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuexperiment

Martin Gardner, The New Ambidextrous Universe
https://books.google.com/books?id=kdLGa8cPPUC&lpg=PP1&pg=PR2#v=onepage&q&f=false

Lecture notes on CP Violation and the CKM Matrix, Cambridge (Mark Thomson)
https://www.hep.phy.cam.ac.uk/thomson/lectures/partIIIparticles/Handout122009.pdf

Homochirality
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homochirality

L-glucose (vs D-glucose)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-Glucose

Radioactive Nucleus Decay
http://www.radioactivity.eu.com/site/pages/RadioactiveSeries.htm

CP Violation in Semi-Leptonic Decays (SEE PAGE 426 for reference to definition of MATTER)
https://www.hep.phy.cam.ac.uk/thomson/lectures/partIIIparticles/Handout122009.pdf

Kaon Decay Modes
http://pdg.lbl.gov/2012/listings/rpp2012-list-K-zero-L.pdf

Flipped bowling Jesus scene in Big Lebowski
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lWz8NGIisMo

Isotopes of Uranium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopesofuranium

Beta Decay
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betadecay

The Wu Experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuexperiment

Kaons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaon

CP Violation in Symmetry Magazine
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/charge-parity-violation

Physics Stack Exchange on CP Violation
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/160511/what-cp-violating-processes-do-we-know-of

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