University of Chicago to hold particle physics conference June 21 to 26

More than 150 scientists from the world’s leading high-energy physics laboratories and universities will meet at the University of Chicago Monday, June 21, to Saturday, June 26, to present and discuss new results and theoretical predictions about the innermost workings of the universe.

The Chicago Conference on Kaon Physics, Kaon ’99, follows last February’s announcement that physicists at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., had made the most definitive observation to date of the unbalanced decay of subatomic matter and antimatter. This decay process, technically known as direct charge-parity violation, may hold the key to understanding the very existence of matter in the universe.

Without such an imbalance, the big bang would have created matter and antimatter in precisely equal amounts. Their mixture would have resulted in instant annihilation of both substances, leaving a universe filled with nothing but light.

Research teams at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., and CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva, Switzerland, will come to Kaon ’99 likely having exciting new results to announce from their own kaon particle decay experiments, said Chicago’s Bruce Winstein, the Samuel Allison Distinguished Service Professor in Physics and conference co-chairperson. Scientists from Italy’s Frascati National Laboratory will present preliminary data from their kaon experiments as well.

Winstein started the Kaons at the Tevatron (KTeV) team at Fermilab, which made last February’s announcement. The KTeV team’s measurement of direct CP violation yielded a value that may be difficult to reconcile with the Standard Model, the prevailing set of theories that describe the workings of the universe at the subatomic level. This possible conflict between experiment and theory will be the subject of a panel discussion the morning of Tuesday, June 22.

"The theorists who have put their necks on the line and calculated this quantity over the last decade or more are all going to be here," Winstein said. They include Andrzej Buras of the Technical University of Munich, Guido Martinelli of the University of Rome and Fred Gilman of Carnegie Mellon University.

There appears to be a difference of opinion on the issue, said Jonathan Rosner, Professor in Physics at Chicago and conference co-chairperson. "KTeV has measured a number that is certainly on the very high side of the distribution of likely values of the Standard Model, at least according to Andrzej Buras, who has plotted such a distribution," Rosner said.

Scientists may have to develop more powerful computational techniques to reconcile kaon theory with experiment, Rosner said. "Computational institutes have been set up just for such things, including one at Brookhaven headed by Tsung-Dao Lee, the Nobel Prize winner. He has been predicting results on a time scale on the order of five years," Rosner said.

The conference will devote a session to the future of kaon particle physics on Saturday morning, June 26. Speaking will be representatives from Fermilab, Brookhaven, CERN, Japan’s National Laboratory for High Energy Physics (KEK) and Russia’s Institute for High Energy Physics.

The conference is funded by the University of Chicago Department of Physics, the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. More information is available on the Kaon ’99 Web site at http://hep.uchicago.edu/kaon99.

Journalists are invited to attend the Chicago Conference on Kaon Physics, which will take place at the Kersten Physics Teaching Center, Room 115, 5720 S. Ellis Ave. To register, please contact Steve Koppes at (773) 702-8366, s-koppesAuchicago.edu.