(Newswire.net— April 17, 2020) — Stars, galaxies, planets, and in fact everything that our lives are made of, exists thanks to the cosmic quirk, the fundamental building block of the universe.
The nature of this particle, which caused the universe to be dominated by matter rather than antimatter, remains a mystery.
Today, the results of an experiment conducted in Japan could help scientists solve one of the biggest puzzles of science, BBC reports. The puzzle is in how to explain the difference in the behavior of matter and antimatter particles.
The world as we know it, including the objects we come in contact with every day, is made up of matter. The basis of matter is elementary particles, such as electrons, quarks, and neutrinos.
But matter also has a twin on the ‘other side of the mirror,’ which is antimatter. Each elementary particle of matter has a corresponding “antiparticle”.
It is assumed that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were generated in the Big Bang. However, when particles of matter and antimatter collide, they “cancel each other out”, disappearing in a flash of energy.
In the first split seconds of the Big Bang the hot, dense Universe was filled with with pairs of matter and antimatter particles that were appearing and disappearing. But there is still a mysterious mechanism that holds it all as it is, without which the Universe would be nothing more than the energy leftover from the process.
So, the main question is why 50 percent of the universe is not made up of antimatter? What happened to all of the antimatter?
As they travel, particles and antiparticles oscillate. Scientists found that matter and antimatter oscillate differently. Physicists believe that finding this difference – or asymmetry – that differentiates neutrinos from antineutrinos can help us understand why matter has outweighed antimatter to such an extent. This asymmetry is known as CP change.
The asymmetry was observed by comparing the numbers of oscillations with which the particles exhibited in the laboratory, and the numbers with which the particles formed in the accelerator. This means that the next-generation DUNE neutrino experiment, for which a compound is currently being built at a mine in South Dakota, could offer some answers even faster than expected.
The US-based detector contains 70,000 tons of liquid argon buried underground at a depth of one mile. This detector will be used to accurately detect and measure CP violations. According to Prof Söldner-Rembold, a member of the DUNE scientific team and a spokesperson for so-called T2K research, this detector will be used to accurately detect and measure CP variations.
The professor adds that the result of T2K is still “to create a theoretical model of the beginning of the creation of the Universe.