# Broken P and CP at RHIC?

1. Feb 15, 2010

### bcrowell

Staff Emeritus
This press release makes it sound like a big deal: http://www.bnl.gov/rhic/news2/news.asp?a=1073&t=pr

On the other hand, this seems to be the paper,
http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.1641
and it never even seems to mention P or CP breaking.

Anyone know any more about this? I'm not even sure if the arxiv paper above is the one that correlates with the press release. The charge asymmetry does sounds like what was described in the press release, and the date seems to match up.

2. Feb 15, 2010

### jmlynarz

3. Feb 15, 2010

### bcrowell

Staff Emeritus
They may not be related. The press release has this: "The observations suggest that positively charged quarks may prefer to emerge parallel to the magnetic field in a given collision event, while negatively charged quarks prefer to emerge in the opposite direction." That seemed to me to sound like the "charge balance function" referred to in the arxiv paper. The other link is that the dates match up closely. But I could be completely wrong. My field is low-energy nuclear structure, not relativistic heavy ion physics.

4. Feb 16, 2010

### bcrowell

Staff Emeritus
5. Feb 17, 2010

### the_house

It took me a while, but I'm pretty sure it's referring to http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1739" [Broken]. I really don't think there are any newer results, though. I'm not sure why the flurry of news releases just came.

It's pretty cool, though, that they could (possibly) be able to detect a parity violation in the strong interactions.

Last edited by a moderator: May 4, 2017
6. Feb 17, 2010

### humanino

Because RHIC will quite soon undergo a major review ?

7. Feb 17, 2010

### the_house

What do you mean?

8. Feb 17, 2010

### humanino

These results are not new, and rather controversial. My above comment is an answer to :
Indeed, controversial results are ideal to claim that the lab is doing "important work". I am not really criticizing, everybody does the same.

9. Feb 17, 2010

### bcrowell

Staff Emeritus
Ah, thanks!

I was really impressed until I saw the $\times 10^{-3}$ lurking up at the top of each y axis in figs 2 and 3. They've got a detection system that's very big and complicated. It would take a lot of convincing to make me believe that they understand all their systematic levels at the $10^{-3}$ level.

Last edited by a moderator: May 4, 2017