n.
In physics, a property related to the symmetry of the wave function representing a system of fundamental particles.
It plays an important role in quantum mechanics in the description of a physical system. Parity transformation replaces a system with a type of mirror image in which the spatial coordinates describing the system are inverted, so that the coordinates x , y , and z are replaced with - x , - y , and - z . If a system is identical to the original system after parity transformation, its parity is even. If the image is the negative of the original, its parity is odd. In either case, the physical observables of the system remain unchanged. In 1957 Chien-Shiung Wu (19121997) and coworkers made the surprising discovery that beta decay reactions do not conserve parity; in other words, the inverted image of the process does not exist in nature. This is a general property of the weak force .