Matter / Antimatter - Atom Smasher Makes New Discovery

The LHCb team stands in front of their experiment, the LHCb detecor, at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva. Image Credit: CERN/Maximilien Brice, Rachel Barbier

Matter / Antimatter - Atom Smasher Makes New Discovery

An atom smasher based near Geneva, Switzerland conducted an experiment recently and found that there may be bits of matter that don't mirror the behavior of their antimatter counterparts.

This observance is unexpected, in that scientists have operated under the theory the universe started off with roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter where particles of antimatter have the same mass of their twins but an opposite charge. They theorized that over the ensuing 14 billion years, most of the antimatter was destroyed, leaving a leftover universe of mainly matter.

After many experiments, in Switzerland, using the Large Hadron Collider, the 17-mile (27 km) circular particle accelerator, researchers are reporting that some matter particles produced inside the machine appear to be behaving differently from their antimatter counterparts, which might provide a partial explanation to the mystery of antimatter.

Roughly equal amounts of matter and antimatter are created in the collision of energetic gold nuclei inside the particle accelerator dubbed RHIC, but because the fireball expands and cools quickly, antimatter can survive longer than that created in the big bang. In this collision an ordinary helium-4 nucleus (background) is matched by a nucleus of antihelium-4 (foreground). Image Credit: STAR Collaboration and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

This excerpted and edited from LiveScience.com -

Is the New Physics Here? Atom Smashers Get an Antimatter Surprise
By lt | LiveScience.com