Abstract: Symmetries in the Physical Laws of Nature lead to observable effects. Beyond the regularities and conserved magnitudes, the last few decades in particle physics have seen the identification of symmetries, and their well-defined breaking, as the guiding principle for the elementary constituents of matter and their interactions. Flavour SU(3) symmetry of hadrons led to the Quark Model and the antisymmetric requirement under exchange of identical fermions led to the colour degree of freedom. Colour became the generating charge for flavour-independent strong interactions of quarks and gluons in the exact colour SU(3) local gauge symmetry. Parity Violation in weak interactions led us to consider the chiral fields of fermions as the objects with definite transformation properties under the weak isospin SU(2) gauge group of the Unifying Electro-Weak SU(2) x U(1) symmetry, which predicted novel weak neutral current interactions. CP-Violation led to three families of quarks opening the field of Flavour Physics. Time-reversal violation has recently been observed with entangled neutral mesons, compatible with CPT-invariance. The cancellation of gauge anomalies, which would invalidate the gauge symmetry of the quantum field theory, led to Quark-Lepton Symmetry. Neutrinos were postulated in order to save the conservation laws of energy and angular momentum in nuclear beta decay. After the ups and downs of their mass, neutrino oscillations were discovered in 1998, opening a new era about their origin of mass, mixing, discrete symmetries and the possibility of global lepton-number violation through Majorana mass terms and Leptogenesis as the source of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. The experimental discovery of quarks and leptons and the mediators of their interactions, with physical observables in spectacular agreement with this Standard Theory, is the triumph of Symmetries. The gauge symmetry is exact only when the particles are massless. One needs a subtle breaking of the symmetry, providing the origin of mass without affecting the excellent description of the interactions. This is the Brout-Englert-Higgs Mechanism, which produces the Higgs Boson as a remnant, discovered at CERN in 2012. Open present problems are addressed with by searching the New Physics Beyond-the-Standard-Model.

Abstract: Observables of neutrino oscillations in matter have, in general, contributions from the effective matter potential. It contaminates the CP violation asymmetry adding a fake effect that has been recently disentangled from the genuine one by their different behavior under T and CPT. Is the genuine T-odd CPT-invariant component of the CP asymmetry coincident with the T asymmetry? Contrary to CP, matter effects in uniform matter cannot induce by themselves a non-vanishing T asymmetry; however, the question of the title remained open. We demonstrate that, in the presence of genuine CP violation, there is a new non-vanishing CP-even, and so CPT-odd, component in the T asymmetry in matter, which is of odd-parity in both the phase delta of the flavor mixing and the matter parameter a. The two disentangled components, genuine A(alpha beta)(T;CP) and fake A(alpha beta)(T;CPT), could be experimentally separated by the measurement of the two T asymmetries in matter (nu(alpha) <-> nu(beta)) and ((nu) over bar <-> (nu) over bar (beta)). For the (nu(mu) <-> nu(e)) transitions, the energy dependence of the new A(mu e)(T;CPT) component is like the matter-induced term A(mu e)(CP;CPT) of the CP asymmetry which is odd under a change of the neutrino mass hierarchy. We have thus completed the physics involved in all observable asymmetries in matter by means of their disentanglement into the three independent components, genuine A(alpha beta)(CP;T) and fake A(alpha beta)(CP;CPT) and A(alpha beta)(T;CPT).

Abstract: Motivated by discrete flavour symmetry models, we analyse Spontaneous CP Violation (SCPV) for potentials involving three or six Higgs fi elds (both electroweak doublets and singlets) which fall into irreducible triplet representations of discrete symmetries belonging to the Delta(3n(2)) and Delta(6n(2)) series, including A(4), S-4, Delta(27) and Delta(54). For each case, we give the potential and fi nd various global minima for di ff erent regions of the parameter space of the potential. Using CP-odd basis Invariants that indicate the presence of Spontaneous CP Violation we separate the VEVs into those that do or do not violate CP. In cases where CP is preserved we reveal a CP symmetry of the potential that is preserved by those VEVs, otherwise we display a non-zero CP-odd Invariant. Finally we identify interesting cases where there is Spontaneous Geometrical CP Violation in which the VEVs have geometrical phases.

Abstract: Instanton solutions of non-abelian Yang-Mills theories generate an effective action that may induce lepton and baryon number violations, namely Delta B = Delta L = nf, being nf the number of families coupled to the gauge group. In this article we study instanton mediated processes in a SU( 2)(l)circle times SU(2)(h)circle times U(1) extension of the Standard Model that breaks universality by singularizing the third family. In the construction of the instanton Green functions we account systematically for the inter-family mixing. This allows us to use the experimental bounds on proton decay in order to constrain the gauge coupling of SU(2)(h). Tau lepton non-leptonic and radiative decays with Delta B = Delta L = 1 are also analysed.

Abstract: In this paper we propose several methods of constructing the system matrix (SM) of a Computed Tomography (CT) scanner with two objectives: (1) to construct SMs in the shortest possible time and store them in an ordinary PC without losing quality, (2) to analyze the possible applications of the proposed method to 3D, taking into account SMs' sizes, computing time and reconstructed image quality. In order to build the SM, we propose two new field of view (FOV) pixellation schemes, based on a polar coordinate system (polar grid) by taking advantage of the polar rotation symmetries of CT devices. Comparisons between the SMs proposed are performed using two phantom and a real CT-simulator images. Global error, contrast, noise and homogeneity of the reconstructed images are discussed.