Tuesday, May 18, 2010

D0 Finds Significant Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry

A press release out of Fermilab on D0 latest finding on matter-antimatter asymmetry.

Scientists of the DZero collaboration at the Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced Friday, May 14, that they have found evidence for significant violation of matter-antimatter symmetry in the behavior of particles containing bottom quarks beyond what is expected in the current theory, the Standard Model of particle physics. The new result, submitted for publication in Physical Review D by the DZero collaboration, an international team of 500 physicists, indicates a one percent difference between the production of pairs of muons and pairs of antimuons in the decay of B mesons produced in high-energy collisions at Fermilab’s Tevatron particle collider.


Zz.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

huh? if at the big bang the universe = +1 (so: universe existed) and
we can pretty much for sure say that the universe exists now (still at a +1 state) then why all the fuss about matter/anti-matter
asymmetry?

if there was pos/neg symmetry the universe (energy, matter, whatever you
wanna call it… the ‘fractions’ of the total)… would = 0…

hence: as soon as there’s existence, surely there’s asymmetry?

ZapperZ said...

I think you need to study a little bit more of the big bang theory AND also the current Standard Model of particle physics. When you create "matter" out of energy, you get equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Example: pair production.

So the fact that we see a severe abundance of matter versus antimatter is a major issue.

Zz.