Conservation Laws

 Physicists like to have clear rules or laws that

determine whether certain process can occur or not.
Certain conservation laws are already familiar from
our study of classical physics. These include mass-
energy, charge, linear momentum, and angular
momentum.

 These are absolute conservation laws: they are

always obeyed.

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 Conservation Laws
 The behavior of elementary particles is
restricted by number of conservation laws.
 Some of the conservation laws are
 1. Conservation of linear momentum
 2 Conservation of angular momentum
 3. Conservation of energy
 4. Conservation of charge
 5. Conservation of lepton number
 6. Conservation of baryon number

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 Conservation of angular
momentum
 It includes both orbital and spin angular
momentum together.
 The orbital angular momentum is given by the
motion of the object as a whole about any
chosen external axis of rotation.
 The spin angular momentum is the intrinsic
angular momentum of each object about an
axis through its own centre of mass.

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 Conservation of energy
 Conservation of energy is more complicated
with elementary particles because a large
fraction of the total energy is often
interchanged between rest energy associated
with mass and kinetic or potential energy.
 The sum of these three energy is always
conserved in any reaction.

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 Conservation of charge
 It is the most familiar of conservation laws.
 The charge is conserved in all processes.
 Due to conservation of charge, an electron cannot
decay.
 The lifetime of electrons against decay into neutral
particles is greater than 5.3 x 1021 years.

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 Conservation of lepton number
 The number of leptons is the same both before and after a
reaction.

 This law states that in any particle reaction / decay, the

total lepton number is always conserved.
 Consider the decay of μ+ meson.

μ+ → e+ + νe + -νμ
-1 -1 1 -1 (lepton number)
In this decay, the lepton number before and after the decay is -1 and
hence the lepton number is conserved.
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 Conservation of baryon number

 The conservation of baryon number requires the same

total baryon number before and after the reaction.

 This law states that in any particle reaction / decay,

the total number of baryons is always conserved.
 Consider the decay λ → p + π-
1 1 0 (baryon number)
Here the baryon number before and after decay is
+1 and hence this decay is allowed.

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 The New Quantum Number:
Strangeness
 Soon after the discovery of hyperons, it was realized that these
particles were behaving in a strange manner. They are produced by
strong interactions. However they have lifetime characteristics of weak
interactions. Their decays are always by a weak interaction.
 Another strange fact about these particles is that they are always
produced in pairs. Eg: K- meson in association with λ or ∑- hyperon
 Strangeness, S, is conserved in the strong and electromagnetic
interactions, but not in the weak interaction.
 The kaons have S = +1, lambda and sigmas have S = −1, the xi
has S = −2, and the omega has S = −3.
 When the strange particles are produced by the p + p strong
interaction, they must be produced in pairs to conserve
strangeness.

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 Conservation of Hypercharge
 One more quantity, called hypercharge, has also become
widely used as a quantum number.
 According to this law, for the strong and electromagnetic
interactions, the total hypercharge remains the same before
and after the particle decay.
p + p → λ0 + K0 + p + π+
1 1 0 1 1 0

Hyper charge before the reaction is

 1+1 = 2
 After the reaction is 1 +1 = 2

 Hence this reaction is possible via strong or electromagnetic interactions.

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 The Conservation of Parity P

 According to conservation of parity, if a process is

subjected to a reflection in mirror so that the sign of
all its coordinates are changed.
x → -x , y → - y , z → - z

 The conservation of parity is valid for the strong

and electromagnetic interactions, but not in the
weak interaction (experimentally).

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 Charge conjugation C
 According to this symmetry principle, when the sign of
charge of a particle is changed, it should be converted
into its corresponding antiparticle.

 Charge conjugation is not conserved in the weak interactions,

but it is valid for the strong and electromagnetic interactions.
 Even though both C and P are violated for the weak
interaction it was believed that when both charge
conjugation and parity operations are performed (called
CP), conservation was still valid.

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 Time reversal (T)
Symmetry
 According to this symmetry principle, an event
on a particle scale should be exactly reversible
in time. t → t’ = - t
 Under this operation, displacement,
acceleration and electric fields remain invariant
but momenta, angular momenta and magnetic
fields invert their signs.
 Time reversal changes the direction of flow of
time, like running the movie of a phenomenon
backwards. The result is usually strange.

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 Quarks
 We are now going to discuss quarks and how they form many
baryons and mesons that have been discovered experimentally.
 In 1961 Gell-Mann and Ne’eman independently proposed a
classification system called the eightfold way that separated
the known particles into multiplets based on charge,
hypercharge, and another quantum number called isospin,
which we have not previously discussed.
 Isospin is a characteristic that can be used to classify different
charged particles that have similar mass and interaction
properties.
 The neutron and proton are members of an isospin multiplet
we call the nucleon. In this case the isospin quantum number (I)
has the value ½, with the proton having the substate value +½
(“spin up”) and the neutron having −½ (“spin down”).
 Isospin is conserved in strong interactions, but not in
electromagnetic interactions.
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 Quarks- fractionally charged
particles
 Most of the matter we see around us is made from protons and
neutrons, which are composed of up and down quarks.
 hadrons were formed from fractionally charged particles
called quarks. The quark theory was successful in describing
properties of the particles and in understanding particle
reactions and decay.
 There are six quarks, but physicists usually talk about them in
terms of three pairs: up/down, charm/strange, and
top/bottom. (Also, for each of these quarks, there is a
corresponding antiquark.)
 Quarks have the unusual characteristic of having a fractional
electric charge, unlike the proton and electron, which have
integer charges of +1 and -1 respectively. Quarks also carry
another type of charge called color charge, which we will
discuss later.
Quantum numbers of
quarks
Type of quark Charge Spin

u (up) +2/3 1/2

d (down) -1/3 1/2

s (strange), S = 1 -1/3 1/2

c (charm), C =1 +2/3 1/2

b (bottom), B = 1 -1/3 1/2

t (top) +2/3 1/2

 Fractional charges and unseen
quarks
Gell-Mann and George Zwieg proposed the idea of the quarks to find
some order in the particles:
 baryons are particles consisting of three quarks (qqq),
 mesons are particles consisting of a quark and anti-quark (q
q-bar).
Qqq Q S Bar.
qqbar Q S Mes.
Uuu 2 0 Δ++
uud 1 0 Δ+ uubar 0 0 0
udd 0 0 Δ0 udbar 1 0 +
ddd -1 0 Δ- ubar d -1 0 -
uus 1 -1 Σ*+ ddbar 0 0 η
uds 0 -1 Σ*0 uus 1 -1 K+
dds -1 -1 Σ*- uds 0 -1 K0
uss 0 -2 Ξ*0 dds -1 -1 K-
dss -1 -2 Ξ*0 uss 0 -2 K0
sss -1 -3 Ω- dss -1 -2 η’
 CP symmetry and its

violation
CP violation is a violation of the postulated CP symmetry of
the laws of physics.
 It plays an important role in theories of cosmology that
attempt to explain the dominance of matter over antimatter in
the present Universe.
 The discovery of CP violation in 1964 in the decays of neutral
kaons resulted in the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980 for its
discoverers James Cronin and Val Fitch. The study of CP
violation remains a vibrant area of theoretical and
experimental work today.
 The strong interaction and electromagnetic interaction seem to
be invariant under the combined CP transformation operation,
but this symmetry is slightly violated during certain types of
weak decay.
 Historically, CP-symmetry was proposed to restore order after
the discovery of parity violation in the 1950s
 CP violation
 Overall, the symmetry of a quantum mechanical system can be
restored if another symmetry S can be found such that the
combined symmetry PS remains unbroken. This rather subtle
point about the structure of Hilbert space was realized shortly
after the discovery of P violation, and it was proposed that charge
conjugation was the desired symmetry to restore order.
 Simply speaking, charge conjugation is a simple symmetry
between particles and antiparticles, and so CP symmetry was
proposed in 1957 by Lev Landau as the true symmetry between
matter and antimatter. In other words a process in which all
particles are exchanged with their antiparticles was assumed to be
equivalent to the mirror image of the original process
 In 1964, James Croninand Val Fitch provided clear evidence that
CP symmetry could be broken, too. Their discovery showed that
weak interactions violate not only the charge-conjugation
symmetry C between particles and antiparticles and the P or
parity, but also their combination. .
 CP violation
 The kind of CP violation discovered in 1964 was linked to the fact
that neutral kaons can transform into their antiparticles (in which
each quark is replaced with its antiquark) and vice versa, but such
transformation does not occur with exactly the same probability in
both directions; this is called indirect CP violation.
 Only a weaker version of the symmetry could be preserved by
physical phenomena, which was CPT symmetry. Besides C and P,
there is a third operation, time reversal (T), which corresponds to
reversal of motion. Invariance under time reversal implies that
whenever a motion is allowed by the laws of physics, the reversed
motion is also an allowed one. The combination of CPT is thought
to constitute an exact symmetry of all types of fundamental
interactions. Because of the CPT-symmetry, a violation of the CP-
symmetry is equivalent to a violation of the T-symmetry. CP
violation implied nonconservation of T, provided that the long-
held CPT theorem was valid. In this theorem, regarded as one of
the basic principles of quantum field theory, charge conjugation,
parity, and time reversal are applied together.
 CPT invariance (1)
 Many of the profound ideas in nature manifest
themselves as symmetries. A symmetry in a physical
experiment suggests that something is conserved, or
remains constant, during the experiment. So
conservation laws and symmetries are strongly linked.
 Three of the symmetries which usually, but not
always, hold are those of charge conjugation (C),
parity (P), and time reversal (T):
 Charge conjugation (C) : reversing the electric charge and
all the internal quantum numbers.
 Parity (P): space inversion; reversal of the space
coordinates, but not the time.
 Time reversal (T): replacing t by -t. This reverses time
derivatives like momentum and angular momentum.
 CPT invariance (1)
 P, CP symmetries are violated in weak interaction. We are left
with the combination of all three, CPT, a profound symmetry
consistent with all known experimental observations.
 On the theoretical side, CPT invariance has received a great deal
of attention. Georg Ludens, Wolfgang Pauli and Julian Schwinger
independently showed that invariance under Lorentz
transformations implies CPT invariance. CPT invariance itself has
implications which are at the heart of our understanding of nature
and which do not easily arise from other types of considerations.
 Integer spin particles obey Bose-Einstein statistics and half-integer
spin particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Particles and antiparticles
have identical masses and lifetimes. This arises from CPT invariance
of physical theories.
 All the internal quantum numbers of antiparticles are opposite to
those of the particles.
 CP violation and
matter/antimatter
 The CPT Theorem guarantees that a particle and its anti-particle
have exactly the same mass and lifetime, and exactly opposite
charge. Given this symmetry, it is puzzling that the universe does
not have equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Indeed, there is
no experimental evidence that there are any significant
concentrations of antimatter in the observable universe.
 There are two main interpretations for this disparity: either when
the universe began there was already a small preference for
matter, with the total baryonic number of the universe different
from zero; or, the universe was originally perfectly symmetric
(B(time = 0) = 0), but somehow a set of phenomena contributed to
a small imbalance. The second point of view is preferred, although
there is no clear experimental evidence indicating either of them
to be the correct one.