printable versionNobel winners’ theory was confirmed at SLAC
The Nobel Prize in physics, awarded Tuesday to one American and two Japanese scientists, has a direct connection to Stanford and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. In 1972, the two Japanese researchers from the University of Kyoto, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, proposed a partial explanation for the broken symmetry seen among particles in the subatomic world. Understanding broken symmetry is a key to understanding, for example, why there is more matter than anti-matter in our universe—a detail that makes it possible for the universe, and us, to exist.
To confirm the researchers' theory experimentally, SLAC scientists studied the broken symmetry in B-meson particles. SLAC's "B Factory," also known as BaBar, produced huge numbers of short-lived B-mesons to find the elusive signs of broken symmetry. The research—and similar work done at the KEK accelerator at Tsukuba in Japan—confirmed the theory for which Kobayashi and Maskawa were awarded the Nobel.
