Question #ffd2c
1 Answer
The experiment's purpose was to establish whether or not conservation of parity will hold in weak interaction. Physicist have assumed that parity would be conserved. This as result that parity was observed in the electromagnetic and strong forces. Wu experiment showed that parity was not conserved and thus P-conservation was violated.
Explanation:
The experiment's purpose was to establish whether or not conservation of parity will hold in weak interaction. Physicist have assumed that parity would be conserved. This as result that parity was observed in the electromagnetic and strong forces. Wu experiment showed that parity was not conserved and thus P-conservation was violated.
In 1956, theoretical physicists Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang suggested that perhaps the weak force might not be the same ‘through the looking-glass’. The idea that the “Law of Conservation of Parity” might be broken was hard to believe. The laws of physics are the same in the mirror for anything else. Face a friend, as in the mirror. If you drop a pencil from your right hand, and your friend mirrors you and drops a pencil with his or her left, the pencils will fall at the same rate. This is because Parity is conserved by the force of gravity – as it is with the electromagnetic force and even the strong (nuclear) force within atomic nuclei. Lee and Yang pointed out that no one had checked to make sure that the weak force, which controls beta decay in radioactive materials, also conserves parity. Lee was right Madame Wu with her brilliant experiment showed that Parity was violated. This was a bit of shock to the physics world...
