{"id":210015,"date":"2025-03-29T09:11:51","date_gmt":"2025-03-29T14:11:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/symmetry-between-up-and-down-quarks-is-more-broken-than-expected"},"modified":"2025-03-29T09:11:51","modified_gmt":"2025-03-29T14:11:51","slug":"symmetry-between-up-and-down-quarks-is-more-broken-than-expected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/symmetry-between-up-and-down-quarks-is-more-broken-than-expected","title":{"rendered":"Symmetry between up and down quarks is more broken than expected"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/symmetry-between-up-and-down-quarks-is-more-broken-than-expected.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In late 2023, Wojciech Brylinski was analyzing data from the NA61\/SHINE collaboration at CERN for his thesis when he noticed an unexpected anomaly\u2014a strikingly large imbalance between charged and neutral kaons in argon\u2013scandium collisions. He found that, instead of being produced in roughly equal numbers, charged kaons were produced 18.4% more often than neutral kaons.<\/p>\n<p>This suggested that the so-called \u201cisospin <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/symmetry\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">symmetry<\/a>\u201d between up and down quarks might be broken by more than expected due to the differences in their electric charges and masses\u2014a discrepancy that existing <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/theoretical+models\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">theoretical models<\/a> would struggle to explain. Known sources of isospin asymmetry only predict deviations of a few percent.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen Wojciech got started, we thought it would be a trivial verification of the symmetry,\u201d says Marek Ga\u017adzicki, who was spokesperson of NA61\/SHINE at the time of the discovery. \u201cWe expected the symmetry to be closely obeyed\u2014although we had previously measured these types of discrepancies at the NA49 experiment, they had large uncertainties and were not significant.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In late 2023, Wojciech Brylinski was analyzing data from the NA61\/SHINE collaboration at CERN for his thesis when he noticed an unexpected anomaly\u2014a strikingly large imbalance between charged and neutral kaons in argon\u2013scandium collisions. He found that, instead of being produced in roughly equal numbers, charged kaons were produced 18.4% more often than neutral kaons. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210015","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210015","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=210015"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210015\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210015"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210015"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210015"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}