Found: clue to crack the antimatter mystery

Imagine you’ve put together a torchlight. You know exactly how each part of the device works. You know exactly how they’re all connected togetger. Yet when you put in fresh batteries and turn it on, the light flickers. You take the torchlight apart, check each component piece by piece. It’s all good. The batteries are fully charged as well. Then you put it back together and turn it — and the light flickers still.

This torchlight is the Standard Model of particle physics. It’s the main theory of its field: it ties together the various properties of all the subatomic particles scientists have found thus far. It organises them into groups, describes how the groups interact with each other, and makes predictions about particles that have been tested to extraordinary precision. And yet, the Standard Model can’t explain what dark matter is, why the Higgs boson is so light or how neutrinos have mass.

Physicists are thus looking for ‘new physics’: a hitherto unseen part of the torchlight’s internal apparatus that causes its light to flicker, i.e. some new particle or force that completes the Standard Model, closing the gaps that the current crop of particles and forces haven’t been able to.

This search for new physics received a boost yesterday when the physicists working with one of the detectors of the Large Hadron Collider reported that they had observed CP violations in baryons. This phenomenon is required to explain why the universe has more matter than antimatter today even though it was assumed to have been born with equal quantities of both. Baryons are particles made up of three quarks, like protons and neutrons.

CP symmetry is the idea that the laws of physics should be the same if you swap all particles with their antiparticles and flip left and right, like looking in a mirror. Thus CP violation in baryons means if swapped a baryon with the corresponding anti-baryon and swapped left and right, the laws of physics won’t be the same, i.e. the laws treat matter and antimatter differently.

I wrote about this finding and its implications — including its place in the Sakharov conditions and what the results mean for the Standard Model — for The Hindu. Do read it.

I’ve found it’s one of those things you don’t read because it has anything to say about saving money or living longer. By reminding you that there’s a natural universe out there worth exploring and discovering and that it contains no sign or imprint of the false justifications humans have advanced for their crimes, perhaps it can help you live better. As I’ve said before, if you’re not interested in particle physics, that’s fine. But remember that you can be.

Featured image: A view of the LHCb detector at the LHC as seen through a fisheye lens. Credit: CERN.