Scientists Just Found a New Matter-Antimatter Clue

If the Big Bang had played fair, you wouldn’t be reading this. Nothing would exist—not stars, not cheese, not you. That’s because, in theory, the universe should’ve created equal amounts of matter and antimatter. And those two tend to clash violently on contact. So if the scales had been balanced, the whole thing should’ve gone kaboom, leaving behind a cosmic “oops” and not much else.

Instead, here we are. And physicists at CERN just found one more piece of the puzzle explaining why.

In a study published in Nature, scientists working on the Large Hadron Collider’s LHCb experiment discovered a small but statistically significant difference in how a particle called the lambda-beauty baryon (Λb) decays compared to its antimatter twin. Physicists already knew that charge-parity violation (CP) violation existed in mesons, but this is the first time it has been definitively observed in baryons.

Scientists Just Found a New Matter-Antimatter Clue

“It shows that the subtle differences between matter and antimatter exist in a wider range of particles,” lead author and CERN physicist Xueting Yang told ScienceAlert. And that could help explain why matter ultimately prevailed.

Here’s the basic explanation. Baryons, like protons and neutrons, make up most of the stuff we care about. Mesons, where CP violation was first found, are weirder and more fleeting. Seeing this asymmetry in baryons is a significant development. The researchers sifted through over 80,000 particle decay events recorded between 2011 and 2018. They found that Λb particles and their antimatter counterparts decay at different rates by approximately 2.5 percent.

That may not sound wild, but in the world of particle physics, it’s big. The result has a statistical significance of 5.2 sigma, which is science-speak for a “discovery.”

Unfortunately, it’s still not enough to fully solve the mystery of how we avoided cosmic mutual destruction. As Yang put it, “The CP violation observed… is consistent with Standard Model predictions, so it does not provide enough CP violation to solve the matter-antimatter puzzle on its own.” But it gives scientists a new place to keep digging—and reason to believe that new physics might be hiding just out of sight.

Basically, we’re a step closer to understanding why reality didn’t delete itself right after it started. And that’s kind of nice to think about.

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