Physics: Wu experiment

Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

Wu experiment By: Chien-Shiung Wu (1956) The Wu experiment was a particle and nuclear physics experiment conducted in 1956 by the Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu in collaboration with the Low Temperature Group of the US National Bureau of Standards.

Commentary

Source: Wikipedia

Wu experiment (1956) Performed by: Chien-Shiung Wu The Wu experiment was a particle and nuclear physics experiment conducted in 1956 by the Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu in collaboration with the Low Temperature Group of the US National Bureau of Standards.

Commentary

Source: Internal

What makes Wu experiment significant? This experim ent is remembered because it gave scientists a way to directly test a theory about nature rather than just theorizing about it. The result either confirmed or challenged what physicists believed at the time.

Commentary

Source: Wikipedia

About Wu experiment The Wu experiment was a particle and nuclear physics experiment conducted in 1956 by the Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu in collaboration with the Low Temperature Group of the US National Bureau of Standards. The experiment's purpose was to establish whether conservation of parity, which was previously establis hed in the electromagnetic and strong interactions, also applied to weak interactions. If parity conservation were universal, particle decays governed by the weak interaction would behave similarly to particle decays involving the other interactions. A parity transformation negates the coordinates in a theory. If the predictions of the theory are not altered, it is said to "conserve parity". A parity transformation creates a mirror image. In mirror images, objects spinning clockwise appear to spin counterclockwise. The Wu experiment created an atomic system with spin, then compared weak-interaction particle decay for spins clockwise and anti-clockwise. The experiment established that conservation of parity was violated by the weak interaction, thus providing a way to operationally define left and right. This result was not expected by the physics community, which had previously regarded parity as a symmetry that applied to all forces of nature. Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, the theoretical physicists who originated the idea of parity nonconservation and proposed the experiment, received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for this result. While not awarded the Nobel Prize, Chien-Shiung Wu's role in the discovery was mentioned in the Nobel Prize acceptance speech of Yang and Lee, but she was not honored until 1978, when she was awarded the first Wolf Prize.