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NTU physicists aid in breakthrough
ONE OF A PAIR:
The experiments were conducted at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization in Japan, one of only two `B-Factory' particle accelerators
STAFF WRITER, WITH CNA
Monday, Mar 31, 2008, Page 2
A group of Taiwanese physicists participated in an international project that helped to uncover clues that may one day lead to an explanation for the absence of antimatter, academic sources said on Saturday.
While conducting particle physics experiments, the Belle collaboration, an international research project based at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Japan, observed in B mesons a new source of charge-parity (CP) violation -- a phenomenon thought to be responsible for eliminating antimatter.
`NATURE'
The results of the experiments were published in the journal Nature and represent a breakthrough in "B-Factory" experiments, a KEK news release said.
Some particle physicists believe that while equal amounts of matter and antimatter were produced in the Big Bang, the antimatter was later destroyed.
One hypothesis on the absence of antimatter concerns the violation of CP symmetry, a difference in the elementary properties of matter and antimatter. To date, evidence of CP violation has only been observed in the K and B meson systems, with larger effect in the latter.
B-Factory
To better understand the CP violation in B mesons, scientists devised the B-Factory -- a particle accelerator -- to produce large numbers of B mesons -- one group of the elementary particles theorized in particle physics.
There are only two B-Factory projects in the world -- the Belle at KEK and the BaBar collaboration at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California.
The 20-strong Taiwanese team, comprised of professors and students from National Taiwan University (NTU), joined the Belle collaboration under the title "NTU High Energy Physics Group" in 1994. The team has since produced some 50 research papers, a team member said.
Team member Chang Pao-ti (張寶棣), a professor in NTU's physics department, described the results as "preliminary," but said that they might be able to establish a new type of physics that could one day explain the absence of antimatter.
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