Primer On Cp, A: The Science Of Matter-antimatter Differences From An Experimentalist’s Perspective

In the Standard Model theory for the interactions of the elementary particles of nature, the transition between matter and antimatter is the combined application of the charge conjugation operator C, which changes particles to antiparticles and vice versa, and the parity operator P, which exchanges right to left and left to right. In spite of the theory’s remarkable success at describing the result of virtually all particle-physics-related measurements, its high degree of CP symmetry makes it unable to explain the huge difference between matter and antimatter that is quite obvious in the matter-dominated universe that we live in, where antimatter only appears as faint transitory traces in radioactive decays and in the debris of cosmic ray interactions.This glaring deficiency of the Standard Model for describing the present-day universe is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that the theory is not complete and that some kind of new, as yet unrealized, additional forces that include alternative CP-violating mechanisms must exist. As a result, experimental searches for new, non-SM sources of CP-symmetry violations in the quark and lepton sectors have become major components of the 21st century’s experimental particle physics agenda.The purpose of this book is to provide a review of the history of the role that C, P, and CP symmetries have played in the development of the SM from an experimentalist’s perspective and describe the motivations for current and planned future experiments.