Measurement of CP-Violation Parameters

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

Recognizing an opportunity to address new physics, a strong collaboration representing 20 institutions, has formed and is proposing funding for the project entitled "Rare Symmetry Violating Processes" (RSVP). RSVP represents an opportunity to empower the university community to make discoveries of extraordinary importance. The current scope of RSVP includes 130 scientists, about 60% from the United States, and the others from Canada, Switzerland, Italy, Japan, and Russia, along with an expected 100 graduate students and post-docs. KOPIO, a component of the RSVP project, is an experiment to measure the branching ratio of the decay of a neutral K meson into a neutral pion, a neutrino, and an anti-neutrino. The interest in this decay mode is that it yields the single, most incisive determination of the parameter describing CP (or time reversal symmetry) violation involving quarks. This in turn will shed light on the reason that our Universe is populated with matter, rather than equal amounts of matter and anti-matter as expected from the naive Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe. This matter anti-matter asymmetry, a critical factor in our origins, is one of the fundamental issues in particle physics today.