Tuesday, February 19, 2013

1302.4191 (Adrian Bevan et al.)

Testing the quantum arrow of time in weak decays    [PDF]

Adrian Bevan, Gianluca Inguglia, Michele Zoccali
The arrow of time is a familiar concept, entropy increases, landscapes are eroded away by the elements, and we inevitably grow older. These irreversible macroscopic effects taint our intuition of time, however it is well known that the quantum arrow of time is different from this entropic behaviour. The laws of quantum physics can be studied under the mathematical T operation that inverts the direction of time. Strong and electromagnetic forces are known to be invariant under temporal inversion, however the weak force is not. The BaBar experiment recently exploited the quantum correlated production of B0 mesons to show that T is a broken symmetry. Here we show that it is possible to perform a wide range of tests of quark flavor changing processes, described by the weak interaction, under the T symmetry in order to validate the Standard Model of particle physics.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1302.4191

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