
New Clue to How Matter Outlasted Antimatter at the Big Bang Is Found
Particles of antimatter, like anti-electrons and anti-protons, possess the same mass but opposite electric charge as the usual electrons and protons. In a discovery published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, an international collaboration of scientists working at the CERN particle physics laboratory outside Geneva described an imbalance among particles that are cousins to the protons and neutrons that make up everyday objects.
That makes the new observations 'very important for us to further understand bigger questions like the matter-antimatter asymmetries in the universe,' said Xueting Yang, a graduate student at Peking University who led the analysis.
The Big Bang that created the universe should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. When a particle of matter bumps into its antimatter counterpart, the two particles annihilate. Thus, all of the matter should have annihilated all of the antimatter in a cataclysmic burst of radiation, leaving an empty universe for eternity.
And yet, 13.8 billion years later, you — made of matter, not antimatter — are reading this news on a device (or in a newspaper), which is also made of matter. Somehow, in the instant after the Big Bang, for each billion or so pairs of matter and antimatter, an extra particle of matter persisted.
This slight tipping of the laws of physics toward matter is known as charge-parity, or CP, violation.
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