Session W1: Plenary Session III: Commemorating the 60th Anniversary of Lee and Yang's Parity Violation Proposal and the Wu Experiment

Stringent Low Energy Tests of the Standard Model, Its Symmetries and Modifications

TBA   

Experiments probing parity violation using electrons at GeV energy

Sixty years after the first discovery of parity violation in electroweak interactions, parityviolating electron scattering (PVES) has become a tool not only in establishing the Standard Model of electroweak physics and studying the subatomic structure of the nucleon, but also in exploring possible new physics beyond the Standard Model. In this talk, I will review progress of PVES using GeV-energy electron beams focusing on recent results from Jefferson Lab. At the end of the talk, I'd like to keep the prospective that as we progress more and more towards a thorough understanding of electroweak physics, we may also want to investigate how parity violation could affect our everyday life.   

Symmetries and Geometry

In this talk, I will describe global and gauge symmetries and the interplay between them. The meaning of global symmetries is clear: they act on physical observables. Gauge symmetries are more elusive as they typically do not act on physical observables. Gauge symmetries are redundancies in the mathematical description of a physical system rather than properties of the system itself. The existence of nonperturbative dualities makes it clear that this distinction is unavoidable. Yet in our best understanding the gauge symmetries are deeper. The lepton number symmetries that are probed by the wonderful experimental results that will be reported in this session give an excellent illustration. They are regarded in the Standard Model as indirect consequences of gauge symmetries and they are expected to be only approximate. This expectation is supported by the observation of neutrino oscillations.