What are the implications of the possible P and CP breaking at RHIC?

[bcrowell]

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.

 

[jmlynarz]

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.

I don't see the link between the paper and the article. How did you end up looking for this publication?

 

[bcrowell]

I don't see the link between the paper and the article. How did you end up looking for this publication?

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.

 

[bcrowell]

It may be this:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.062301

The press release says there was a recent PRL.

 

[the_house]

It took me a while, but I'm pretty sure it's referring to http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1739" . 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.

 

[humanino]

Because RHIC will quite soon undergo a major review ?

 

[the_house]

Because RHIC will quite soon undergo a major review ?

What do you mean?

 

[humanino]

What do you mean?

These results are not new, and rather controversial. My above comment is an answer to :

I'm not sure why the flurry of news releases just came.

Indeed, controversial results are ideal to claim that the lab is doing "important work". I am not really criticizing, everybody does the same.

 

[bcrowell]

It took me a while, but I'm pretty sure it's referring to http://arxiv.org/abs/0909.1739" .

Ah, thanks!

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

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.