Physicists see new difference between matter and antimatter

An experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, has seen a new difference in the way matter and antimatter behave differently — one that physicists have been hunting for decades.

Physicists observed the behaviour — which researchers had predicted and which fits with the standard model of particle physics — in decays of particles called D mesons in the LHCb experiment at CERN, Europe’s particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

The discovery reveals one small mechanism that contributes to there being more matter than antimatter — mirror-image particles of matter that have opposite charge — in the Universe. Understanding the imbalance is one of the most pressing mysteries in physics, because it explains why matter exists. If, in the early Universe, matter and antimatter had existed in equal parts, they would have annihilated each other to leave nothing but radiation.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-00961-w

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