‘Strange’ particle helps explain the lack of antimatter in the Universe

Scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider have made a new discovery that may help explain why the universe is made of matter instead of antimatter, and possibly why it exists at all.

Anyone who's even vaguely familiar with Star Trek has heard of antimatter. They combine it with matter in the the ship's engine to power the warp drive. For those that are unfamiliar with exactly what antimatter is, it's basically matter flipped on its head — particles of exactly the same mass as their matter counterparts, but with exactly opposite electric charge and quantum spin. Matter has protons, neutrons and electrons, and antimatter matches them with antiprotons, antineutrons and positrons.

Again, anyone who knows Star Trek knows that if you put matter and antimatter together, they completely destroy each other and release a lot of energy in the process (E=mc² and c is a very big number).

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When physicists worked out what the early universe looked like, even down to the tiniest fractions of a second after the big bang, they found that there was very likely an even split between matter and antimatter. So, if this is true, why is there mostly matter and almost no antimatter today, and maybe even more importantly, why didn't the universe just annihilate itself shortly after the big bang?

Well, it turns out that when subatomic particles break apart into even tinier subatomic particles, the 'pieces' they break down into aren't evenly split between matter and antimatter. Instead, they produce more matter.

The first discovery of his was back in 1964, when physicists found that a particle called the 'K-meson' (or Kaon) broke down into two matter particles and one antimatter particle. The scientists thought that they'd see particles breaking down into equal amounts of matter and antimatter, what they referred to as 'Charge Parity Symmetry' (or 'CP Symmetry'), so this result violated that expectation (and they called it a 'CP violation'). This discovery earned James Cronin and Val Fitch a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1980.

This latest discovery by CERN — involving a particle called the 'Strange B meson' — showed the same tendency for the particle to break down into more matter than antimatter, and since the scientists had around 70 trillion collisions to look at, there is less than a 1 in 3.5 million chance that their results are wrong. Even leaving some margin open (as science always allows for), that's about as certain as you can get that your results are true. According to Pierluigi Campana, the spokesperson for the LHCb collaboration, the LHC is the only facility that has been able to gather enough particle collision data to give them a result that certain.

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This new discovery strengthens our understanding of the universe and helps answer some of the fundamental questions we have, but there is still work to be done. The Standard Model of particle physics can account for these CP violations, but the effects they're seeing still don't completely explain the vast dominance of matter in the universe.

"However, by studying these CP violation effects we are looking for the missing pieces of the puzzle," said Campana in the CERN statement, "which provide stringent tests of the theory and are a sensitive probe for revealing the presence of physics beyond the Standard Model."

(Images courtesy: Denis Balibouse/Reuters, CERN)

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