by Why didn’t the universe annihilate shortly after the Big Bang? A new finding at CERN on the French-Swiss border brings us closer to answering this fundamental question of why matter about its opposite dominating animacy.
Much of what we see in everyday life consists of matter. But antimatter exists in much smaller quantities.
Matter and antimatter are almost direct opposites. Materie particles have an antimatter counterpart with the same mass, but the opposite electrical charge. For example, the matter of the matter is teamed up by antimatter antiprotone, while the electron of matter is compiled by antimatter positron.
However, the symmetry of behavior between matter and antimatter is not perfect. In a newspaper published this week in NatureThe team, which is working on an experiment at CERN called LHCB, reported that it has discovered differences in speed, in which matter particles are called baryos compared to the rate of their antimatter counterparts.
In particle physics, the decay refers to the process, in which unstable subatomare particles turn into two or lighter, more stable particles.
According to cosmological models, the same amounts of matter and antimatter were made in the Big Bang. When matter and antimatter particles come into contact, they destroy each other and leave pure energy behind.
In this sense, it is a miracle that the universe is not only of the remaining energy from this extermination process.
The same amounts of matter and antimatter were made in the Big Bang (Getty Images/iStockphoto)
However, astronomical observations show that there is now a negligible amount of antimatter in the universe in the universe. We therefore know that matter and antimatter have to behave differently, so that antimatter has disappeared while the matter is not the case.
The understanding of what causes this difference between matter and antimatter is an important unanswered question. While there are differences between matter and antimatter in our best theory of basic quantum physics, the standard model, these differences are far too small to explain where all antimatter went.
So we know that there must be additional basic particles that we have not yet found, or effects that go beyond those described in the standard model. These would lead to great differences in the behavior of matter and antimatter so that our universe exists in its current form.
Unveil new particles
Excessive measurements of the differences between matter and antimatter are a central topic of research because they have the potential to influence and reveal these new basic particles, which helps us to discover physics that led to today’s universe.
Differences between matter and antimatter were previously observed in the behavior of another particle type, mesons, which consist of a curd and antiquarian. There are also indications of differences in the way the matter and antimacy versions of another particle type, neutrino, behave as they travel.
The study was carried out on the Great Hadron Collider (PA Media)
The new measurement of LHCB has determined differences between baryons and anti -baryons, which consist of three quarks or three antiquarians. Significantly, baryons make up most of the well -known matter in our universe, and this is the first time that in this group we have observed differences between matter and antimatter.
The LHCB experiment on the Great Hadron collider is intended to carry out very precise measurements of differences in the behavior of matter and antimacy. The experiment is operated by international cooperation between scientists, which consist of over 1,800 people in 24 countries.
In order to achieve the new result, the LHCB team examined over 80,000 baryons (“Lambda-B”-bobbaric, which consist of a beauty curd, one up and down curd) and their antimacy colleagues.
We found it crucial that these baryons on specific subatomar particles (a proton, a kaon and two pions) fall a little more – 5 percent more – more frequently than the speed at which the same process occurs with anti -particles.
This difference is statistically significant enough to be the first observation of behavioral differences between baryon and anti -baryone decays.
So far, all measurements of differences between matter antimacy matched the low level in the standard model. While the new measurement of LHCB also matches this theory, it is an important step forward.
We have now seen differences in the behavior of matter and antimatter in the group of particles that dominate the well -known matter in the universe. It is a potential step to understand why this situation came after the big bang.
With the current and upcoming data from LHCB, we can examine these differences forensically and, as we hope, find out a sign of new basic particles that could possibly be present.
William Barter is a Ukri Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Edinburgh
This article was originally published in conversation and is published again as part of a Creative Commons license. Read that Original article
