Why is there a Universe, and why is it filled with matter, and not equal amounts of matter and antimatter? The last question is a puzzle that has gainfully occupied the minds of and employed physicists for many years. The time spent pondering such questions has not been wasted, as it turns out, as researchers from the Large Hadron Collider b detector report that one of the theoretical paths that allows matter to outnumber antimatter is open for business....Researchers at the LHCb have shown that baryons (along with mesons) also violate Charge-Parity (CP) symmetry, thus making it statistically possible for more matter to be created than antimatter.
(Caveat: Dataset currently provides "only" a 3.3 sigma confidence level.)
The full article, Measurement of matter–antimatter differences in beauty baryon decays which appears in the journal Nature Physics is available at: http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys4021.html
Other coverage:
Ars Technica
phys.org
http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nphys4021.html
Related Stories
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."
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
(Score: 2) by melikamp on Friday February 03 2017, @03:10AM
No need for scary quotes in my opinion: assuming one-sided test, a study like that is due to chance 1 time out of 2069.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @09:43PM
By convention, the particle physics community doesn't get super excited until they see it at least at the 5-sigma level [scientificamerican.com].
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday February 03 2017, @03:30AM
My understanding is we're matter only because we make up the world as we know it. For all we know (as I understand it) we could be the lone matter bubble in an anti-matter universe.
Meteors, comets, they all come from our solar system. How do we know Proxima Centauri isn't made of anti-matter?
Hell, the Andromeda galaxy is going to collide with the Milky way a few years after I die. What it's it's full of anti-matter?
When the dust settled America realized it was saved by a porn star.
(Score: 4, Informative) by takyon on Friday February 03 2017, @04:09AM
That "matter" was settled during the early universe, when stuff was closer together.
https://press.cern/backgrounders/matterantimatter-asymmetry [press.cern]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @05:37AM
For all we know (as I understand it) we could be the lone matter bubble in an anti-matter universe.
Because space isn't empty. The exo-galactic space in our local supercluster is filled with dust coming from each galaxy, if any one was made of anti-matter, then it's boundary space between it and the galaxies made of matter will emit a lot of gama radiation.
If there are any galaxies made out of anti-matter out there, they are far beyond the reach of our instruments.
(Score: 2) by esperto123 on Friday February 03 2017, @10:23AM
I was about to say the same as the AC above.
For a long time I wondered myself how do we know that the stuff outside earth are matter or anti-matter, and it boils down to the interface, if an asteroid, planet, solar system or galaxy were to be made of anti-matter, the gases and dust they emit would annihilate with the gas or dust emitted by the other stuff made of matter nearby and we would see a big area emitting huge amounts of gamma rays, and we don't see it, not even around the most distant starts visible, so this probably means that if there was anti-matter created with the big bang, it was in lower quantities than regular matter and was annihilated pretty quickly.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday February 03 2017, @07:37PM
Well, that's not clear. There are other alternatives to unequal amounts being created, it's just that they depend on mechanisms that we don't have good reason to believe existed. For Example:
We don't see the entire universe, over half (how much over we can't guess) is probably invisible because it's outside out light-cone. So if at the time of creation for some reason matter was "emitted" in one direction and anti-matter in the opposite, we'd never see a region of gamma emission, because it would be outside our light cone.
My favorite speculation along these lines has the big bang exploding two ways through time, so the anti-matter was moving backwards through time relative to our perceived direction of time. I don't know of any way to check this, but a positron appears to be identical to an electron moving backwards in time, and I believe the same is true of a proton and an anti-proton. And of course light doesn't move through time at all, because anything that's moving at the speed of light has time frozen. There might still be ways to disprove this, but I haven't heard of any, any more than I've heard of ways to prove it.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @04:14AM
Perhaps the submitter is not a native English speaker/writer. Or, perhaps, worse, and more likely, s/he is.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @07:48AM
In the early universe there was only radiation, then a kugelblitz formed. This black hole sucked in 1/2 a spontaneously produced matter-antimatter pair. It happened to be the anti-matter one. Forever after, antimatter was at a disadvantage. What is wrong with that simple idea?
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Friday February 03 2017, @05:54PM
Forever after, antimatter was at a disadvantage. What is wrong with that simple idea?
Probably that it would have been at advantage of one, and there are at least two matter particles in the universe. Probably more, I haven't counted.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Geezer on Friday February 03 2017, @03:48PM
All this stuff had to go somewhere.