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posted by martyb on Thursday October 26 2017, @01:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the and-hummingbirds-should-not-fly dept.

The apparent symmetry between matter and antimatter is puzzling scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN):

One of the great mysteries of modern physics is why antimatter did not destroy the universe at the beginning of time.

To explain it, physicists suppose there must be some difference between matter and antimatter – apart from electric charge. Whatever that difference is, it's not in their magnetism, it seems.

Physicists at CERN in Switzerland have made the most precise measurement ever of the magnetic moment of an anti-proton – a number that measures how a particle reacts to magnetic force – and found it to be exactly the same as that of the proton but with opposite sign. The work is described in Nature [open, DOI: 10.1038/nature24048] [DX].

"All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist," says Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN's Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration. "An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is."

CP violation.

Previously: Evidence Mounts that Neutrinos are the Key to the Universe's Existence
Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry Confirmed in Baryons
LHCb Observes an Exceptionally Large Group of Particles
Possible Explanation for the Dominance of Matter Over Antimatter in the Universe


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:47PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 26 2017, @03:47PM (#587852)

    This reminds me of the L-protein versus R-protein question.
    Which is is life predominantly expressing / using Left chirality folding versus being a mix or being Right chirality dominated life.

    It make one wonder what would be different in a universe made of anti-matter and Right chirality.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by HiThere on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:53PM

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 26 2017, @05:53PM (#587903) Journal

    That actually is a reasonably reasonable conjecture.

    IIRC, it was shown that a part of the reason that we ended up with the chirality we did was because of an instability caused by a non-symmetric effect from beta radiation. I never understood the argument, but it did seem to imply that if anti-matter dominated we would have evolved with the opposite chirality. And I believe that observations of molecular clouds seem to show that Earth has the normal chirality. But, of course, the gas clouds were of matter rather than of anti-matter, or we'd have been seeing large numbers of annihilations between electrons and positrons, that we don't see.

    --
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  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday October 27 2017, @07:08AM

    by pTamok (3042) on Friday October 27 2017, @07:08AM (#588143)

    It's a bit dated now*, but the book 'The Left Hand of the Electron' [wikipedia.org] written by the science popularizer and Science Fiction author Isaac Asimov [wikipedia.org] covers this topic in the first 5 chapters.

    It's worth a read.

    If you are not familiar with Asimov, I think this xkcd [xkcd.com] might apply.

    *Published in the 1970s, I think.