Two Experiments Observe Explicit Violation of Time‐Reversal Symmetry
FEB 01, 1999
For 35 years we’ve believed that some elementary processes can’t quite run backward. Now, at last, we have direct evidence.
DOI: 10.1063/1.882519
It is hard to imagine that nature might violate the CPT theorem. Its proof invokes only rock‐bottom assumptions of quantum field theory, and many of its consequences have been tested to very high precision. The theorem, independently discovered in the mid‐1950s by Gerhardt Lüders, Wolfgang Pauli and John Bell, asserts that any local field theory that is invariant under the “proper” Lorentz transformations must also be invariant under the combined operation of the three discrete (improper) transformations: time reversal (T), parity inversion (P) and charge conjugation (C).
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© 1999 American Institute of Physics
