Physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory think they may have broken a law of nature, though for a very small fraction of time.
STAR experiment collaborators at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider have been smashing the nuclei of gold atoms together to study the law of parity under the extreme conditions created by the 2.4-mile-circumference particle accelerator. On this particular occasion, its collision created a plasma “bubble” that seemed to violate parity, the idea that the laws of physics remain unchanged when expressed in inverted coordinates. While it only lasted for a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second, physicists on the experiment hope that the result will help move them forward in understanding the basic structure of the universe moments after the Big Bang.
Physicists on the project recognize that the effect only suggests that parity violation took place, and are testing the result by running the experiment at lower collision energies. They hope this will allow them to see if the violation disappears in less extreme conditions. Eager to find answers, the STAR collaboration has decided to open up the research to scrutiny by other physicists.
“I think it’s a real effect, but we’ll know more in the coming years,” said Jack Sandweiss, Yale’s Donner Professor of Physics.
