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Ytterbium's Broken Symmetry


July 22, 2009

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Of the four fundamental interactions, the weak interaction has the shortest range of the fundamental forces and does some of the most peculiar things, like changing the flavor of quarks, governing the interactions of neutrinos and violating parity--nature's mirror symmetry. In ytterbium, researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Nuclear Science Division and the University of California at Berkeley have measured the largest parity violations ever observed in an atom.Full Story

Source
DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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