The fact that matter and antimatter particles destroy each other on contact has long puzzled physicists wondering how life, or universe can exist at all. But new results from a particle accelerator experiment suggest that matter does seem to win in the end. The experiment has shown a small — but significant — 1 percent difference between the amount of matter and antimatter produced, which could hint at how our matter-dominated existence came about.
The theory, known as the Standard Model of particle physics, has predicted some violation of matter-antimatter symmetry, but not enough to explain how our universe arose consisting mostly of matter with barely a trace of antimatter. But this latest experiment came up with an unbalanced ratio of matter to antimatter that goes beyond the imbalance predicted by the Standard Model. Specifically, physicists discovered a 1 percent difference between pairs of muons and antimuons that arise from the decay of particles known as B mesons.
The results, announced Tuesday, came from analyzing eight years worth of data from the Tevatron collider at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill.
The Tevatron collider and its bigger cousin, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland, can smash matter and antimatter particles together to create energy, as well as new particles and antiparticles. Otherwise, antiparticles only arise due to extreme events such as nuclear reactions or cosmic rays from dying stars.
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