The behaviour of quarks, which are the fundamental building blocks of matter along with leptons, can shed light on the difference between matter and antimatter. And it is this surplus that makes up everything we see in the universe today.Įxactly what processes caused the surplus is unclear, and physicists have been on the lookout for decades. This created a small surplus of matter, and as the universe cooled, all the antimatter was destroyed, or annihilated, by an equal amount of matter, leaving a tiny surplus of matter. Scientists believe that in the very hot and dense state shortly after the Big Bang, there must have been processes that gave preference to matter over antimatter. Over the next few decades physicists found that all matter particles have antimatter partners. At first, it was not clear if this was just a mathematical quirk or a description of a real particle.īut in 1932 Carl Anderson discovered an antimatter partner to the electron - the positron - while studying cosmic rays that rain down on Earth from space. The existence of antimatter was predicted by physicist Paul Dirac’s equation describing the motion of electrons in 1928. So what happened to it? Using the LHCb experiment at CERN to study the difference between matter and antimatter, we have discovered a new way that this difference can appear. The problem is that would have made it all annihilate.īut today, there’s nearly no antimatter left in the universe - it appears only in some radioactive decays and in a small fraction of cosmic rays. If antimatter and matter are truly identical but mirrored copies of each other, they should have been produced in equal amounts in the Big Bang. When an antimatter and a matter particle meet, they annihilate in a flash of energy. All the particles that make up the matter around us, such electrons and protons, have antimatter versions which are nearly identical, but with mirrored properties such as the opposite electric charge. It’s one of the greatest puzzles in physics.
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