CERN Breakthrough Reveals Why Matter Survived the Big Bang
Scientists in the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Geneva, have measured a fundamental difference in the behavior of matter and antimatter for the first time. This explains why we have it at all.
Strange imbalance
The observation, published in the journal Nature marks significant progress in decades of striving for physics to solve one of the greatest puzzles in the universe: why does something exist at all – and not nothing? The universe, as we know it, essentially consists of matter. But according to common theory, the same amounts of matter and antimatter were created in the Big Bang, which should have wiped out each other. Why a surplus of matter survived is still unclear.
The new research work is based on data from the LHCB experiment, which was specially developed to discover fine differences – so -called CP injuries – between matter and antimatter. This violation of the so-called cargo parity symmetry is an indication that matter and antimatter ultimately do not behave identically in certain processes.
For the first time, such a CP injury was measured by baryons – particles, which also include protons and neutrons, i.e. the building blocks of all atoms. Specifically, baryoses, which consist of an up, a down and a so-called beauty curd, disintegrate in a slightly different way than their antimacy counterparts.
It is not enough yet
“This is a milestone,” said Xueting Yang from the University of Beijing and member of the LHCB team, the findings. “The discovery opens up a new perspective to look for previously unknown physical phenomena.” Despite the groundbreaking measurement, the puzzle remains: According to current knowledge, the CP injury found is not sufficient to explain the observed dominance of matter in the universe.
Theorists such as Jessica Turner from the University of Durham emphasize that undiscovered particles with far stronger effects that could have played a crucial role in the early days of the cosmos must exist. The researchers at CERN hope to uncover further deviations from the standard model of particle physics with future measurements – based on a 30 -fold amount of data.
