Milind Purohit

Milind Purohit

Professor, Chair

PSC 609
Physics and Astronomy
University of South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
(803) 777-6996
e-mail

Education

  • Ph.D., Experimental High Energy Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA. (1983)
  • M.S., Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India. (1978)

Research Interests

Matter is everyday stuff. And anitmatter is the stuff of science fiction. Or is it? As it turns out, for every matter particle, there is an antimatter particle. This antimatter can be made in our labs and behaves exactly like matter - is stable, you could make chairs and tables out of it! Until it comes in contact with matter! Then you get tremendous explosions of energy.

Why is the universe made entirely out of matter? If antimatter is identical to matter where is it? This question is perhaps the most fundamental question in physics today!

An experiment done in 1964 using "K" particles indicates that there is some small difference between matter and antimatter. While that experiment has been successfully repeated many times since, no experiment using particles other than "K" mesons has ever shown the same result. We are now participating in a landmark experiment at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center which searches for new evidence of a matter-antimatter asymmetry.

Our experiment, called BaBar, produces a heavy new particle-antiparticle pair called "B" and "anti-B". We live in exciting times - we may finally start to understand why the universe is not just a giant bath of energy. Indeed, we may understand why life and all that it is based on can exist.

Selected Publications

  • "Observation of CP Violation in the B0 meson system," B. Aubert et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 87 901801 (2001).
  • "Multidimensional Resonance Analysis of Λ+c → p K-π+," E. M. Aitalal et al., Physics Letters B471, 449 (2000).
  • "Measurement of the D+s lifetime," E. M. Aitala et al., Physics Letters B445, 449 (1999)
  • "A Search for D0 - Anti-D0 Mixing and Doubly Cabibbo Suppressed Decays of the D0 in Hadronic Final States," E. M. Aitala et al., Physical Review D57, 13 (1998).
  • "Search fo CP Violation in Charged D Meson Decays," E. M. Aitala et al., Physics Letters B403, 377 (1997).