Parity Violation in Beta Decay (Wu Experiment) | Weak Interaction in Particle Physics

Published: 08 April 2020
on channel: For the Love of Physics
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Parity - 01:22 | Neutrinos - 08:29 | Wu Experiment - 21:25

Parity is a mathematical transformation that effectively inverts or flips the axes of a coordinate-reference system. In doing so it transforms a right handed coordinate system to a left handed coordinate system, thus giving us a mirror image of the physical phenomenon.

It was long believed that the Physical laws in our Universe are invariant with respect to a parity transformation, i.e. the laws of our universe cannot distinguish between a physical phenomenon happening in our Universe and its (parity-inverted) mirror image in a mirror Universe, thus making both the phenomenon equally likely. In short, our Universe is symmetric w.r.t a parity transformation ie. left and right. If a particular phenomenon is likely, then its parity inverted (or mirror image) phenomenon is also equally likely.

However, this symmetry or parity (or conservation of partiy) is violated in the case of Weak interactions. One of very first experiments to observe violation of partiy was performed by Chein Shiung Wu et all around 1956, by looking at the Beta decay of Co-60. Beta decay essentially involves weak interaction. What the Wu Experiment found was that the electrons emitted in the beta decay were preferentially emitted opposite to the direction of Co-60 nuclear spin. This violated the idea of parity symmetry, because otherwise there is no reason for the electrons to be emitted preferentially in one particular direction. This is also the reason why the neutrinos emitted are left handed and anti-neutrinos emitted are right handed in weak interactions. So violation of parity symmetry in beta decay was shown by the Wu Experiment, after which this principle was revisited.

In this video i discuss the above ideas..

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