CERN Discovery Offers Insight About the Antimatter - Matter Discrepancy

One of the lingering mysteries in physics is the supposed equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe - and a new experiment at CERN might explain why it isn't so.

All matter around us comprises elementary particles like protons and electrons, and antimatter is basically a matter composed of "mirrored" versions of these particles - sometimes called "antiparticles" - such as antiprotons positrons. Suppose antimatter and matter are basically mirror versions of each other. In that case, scientists argue that they should have been produced in the same amounts after the Big Bang - generally accepted as the origin of the Universe.

This poses a problem: if they are in equal amounts and that the collision of these mirror opposites leads to annihilation, antimatter should've canceled out all the matter in the universe. Obviously, this is not the case. Additionally, antimatter is now rarely detected, only found in trace amounts from radioactive decays and cosmic rays.

British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac first predicted antimatter through his equations that describe the electron motion in 1928. His relativistic version for the Schrodinger wave equation had provisions for the potential existence of particles known as antielectrons discovered by Carl Anderson in 1932 and called positrons, for "positive electrons."

Reporting the First Direct CP Violation Observation

The imbalance between matter and antimatter, or asymmetry, is taken to suggest a difference in their respective behaviors. It is known as CP violation and is considered under the Standard Model of Physics. However, the constraints provided for the CP violation does not cover the exceedingly large amounts of asymmetry of matter over antimatter.

Using the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Experiment in CERN, scientists discovered conditions that illustrate this difference. In a CERN seminar last October, the LHCb collaboration reported the first-ever observation of time-dependent CP violation in neutral Bs0 (B mesons) decays. The team behind this discovery has recently uploaded their findings on the online repository arXiv last December 23.

In the context of quantum mechanics, B0 and Bs0 mesons are found to turn into their antiparticle versions and back in a phenomenon called "mixing" or "oscillating." As the Bs0 meson oscillates with extremely high frequency, it gives rise to another event known as the time-dependent CP violation - illustrating the asymmetry as the meson decays into K+K- pairs.

The LHCb team has already observed the kaon particles' invariant mass distribution (K mesons) as early as 2013, using 2011 collected data. To illustrate this CP violation, researchers explained in a 2011 video that it is similar to a dancer, with the "reflection" becoming different from the actual object at a specific time frame.

The LHCb Experiment

The Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment is one of eight ongoing particle physics detector projects at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN. As a specialized b-physics experiment - one focused on the detection and observation of the bottom/ beauty quark or the b-quark - it measures the behavior of CP violation events with respect to b-hadrons, or heavy particles with the b-quark.

The LHCb experiment is located at the Large Hadron Collider tunnel section close to the commune of Ferney-Voltaire in Southeastern France, a little past the border from Geneva, Switzerland.