An Overview of the Searches for the Violation of the Charge-Parity Symmetry in the Leptonic Sector

Abstract

The existence of a violation of the Charge-Parity (CP) symmetry in the laws of physics is one of the cornerstone conditions for the generation of a matter–antimatter imbalance necessary to the creation of a matter-dominated universe. The first experimental evidence of the fact that this symmetry is broken in nature was obtained in 1964 in the observations of the decays of neutral kaon mesons. The magnitude of CP violation in the quark sector was measured with an increasing precision exploring also decays of other mesons. However, CP violation in the quark sector alone is not sufficient to explain the formation of matter-dominated universe, and additional sources are required. One such potential source is the lepton sector, where the CP violation could be observed by studying neutrino oscillations with neutrino beams generated by particle accelerators. This article reviews the present efforts in this direction. The results obtained in the ongoing experiments, T2K in Japan and NOvA in USA, are discussed. Additionally, the search for leptonic CP violation is one of the key goals in the programs of future experiments, DUNE in USA and Hyper-Kamiokande in Japan. These experiments and their prospects for its discovery are also presented.

Keywords

• neutrino oscillations
• long-baseline experiments
• leptonic CP violation