The Large Hadron Collider Discovers Antimatter Behaving Oddly in New Class of Particles

Mystery Antimatter Physics discovered at the great collision of Hadrons

By Clara Moskowitz Edited by Lee Billings

Material and antimatter are like opposite to the mirror: they are the same in all respects, except for their electrical load. Well, almost the same – very sometimes, material and antimatter behave differently from each other, and when they do, physicists are very excited. Now, scientists of the largest collision of particles in the world have observed a new class of antimatter particles decomposing at a different rate from their counterparts. Discovery is an important step in the quest for physicists to resolve one of the greatest mysteries in the universe: why there is something rather than nothing.

The world around us is made of matter – the stars, the planets, the people and the things that populate our cosmos are made up of atoms that contain only matter and not antimatter. But it shouldn’t be like this. Our best theories suggest that when the universe was born, it had equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and when the two contacted, they wiped out. For any reason, a little excess of matter has survived and continued to create the physical world. For what? No one knows.

Physicists were therefore looking for any sign of difference between matter and antimatter, known in the field as a violation of “charge combination – the symmetry of the captain” or a CP violation, which could explain why a certain matter escaped destruction in the beginning of the universe.

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Today, physicists of the LHCB LHCB experience of Big Hadron Collider (LHC) have published an article in the journal Nature announcing that they have measured the violation of the CP for the first time in the bars – the class of particles which includes protons and neutrons inside the atoms. The bars are all built from triplets of even smaller particles called quarks. Previous experiences dating back to 1964 had seen a violation of the CP in the particles of Meson, which, unlike the bars, are made of a pair of Quark-Anquark. In the new experience, scientists have observed that the bars were making a quark up, a down -in -down quark and one of their most exotic cousins called a decay of quark of beauty more often than the bars made of the antimatter versions of these same three quarks.

“This is an important step in the search for the CP violation,” explains Xueting Yang of the University of Beijing, a member of the LHCB team who analyzed the data behind the measure. “Given that the bars are the constituent elements of the daily things that surround us, the first observation of the violation of CP in the baritards opens up a new window to search for advice of new physics.”

The LHCB experience is the only machine in the world that can invoke sufficient energies to make bars containing quarks of beauty. He does so by accelerating the protons at almost the speed of light, then breaking them together in around 200 million collisions each second. As the protons dissolve, the energy of the crash springs up new particles.

“It’s an incredible measure,” said physicist Edward Witten from the Institute for Advanced Study, who was not involved in the experience. “Bars containing B [beauty] Quarks are relatively difficult to produce and the CP violation is very delicate and difficult to study. »»

The LHCB experience 69 feet long and 6,000 tonnes can follow all the particles created during the collisions and the many different ways to decompose in smaller particles. “The detector is like a gigantic four-dimensional camera which is capable of recording the passage of all particles through it,” explains the spokesperson for LHCB and co-author of the Vincenzo Vagnoni study of the Italian National Nuclear Physics Institute (INFN). “With all this information, we can precisely rebuild what happened in the initial collision and everything that came out and then broken down.”

Scientists of the difference in matter observed in this case are relatively small, and it is part of the predictions of the standard model of particle physics – the reigning theory of the subatomic domain. This puny quantity of CP violation, however, cannot explain the deep asymmetry between matter and antimatter that we see throughout space.

“The measure itself is a great success, but the result, for me, is not surprising,” explains Jessica Turner, theoretical physicist of the University of Durham in England, who was not involved in research. “The observed CP violation seems to be in accordance with what has been measured in the quark sector, and we know that is not enough to produce the observed Baryon asymmetry.”

To understand how the material has obtained the upper hand in the first universe, physicists must find new ways whose material and antimatter diverge, most likely via particles that have not yet been seen. “There should be a new class of particles that were present in the early universe, which have a much larger quantity of this behavior,” explains Vagnoni. “We are trying to find little differences between what we observe and what is planned by the standard model. If we find a difference, then we can determine what is wrong.”

Researchers hope to discover more cracks in the standard model as the experience continues to work. Finally, the LHCB should collect about 30 times more data than what has been used for this analysis, which will allow physicists to seek a CP violation in the disintegrations of the particles which are even rarer than that observed here. So stay listening for an answer to the reason why something exists.