All articles tagged with #antimatter
NASA’s four long-duration balloons over Antarctica carried the GAPS antimatter detector, the PUEO neutrino observatory, and calibration HiCal payloads, flying for weeks to gather data on rare particles and push forward our search for dark matter and insights into the universe’s origins.
Researchers at CERN's BASE collaboration have successfully demonstrated the first antimatter quantum bit by trapping and maintaining an antiproton's quantum state for nearly a minute, paving the way for more precise tests of fundamental symmetries between matter and antimatter and advancing quantum sensing techniques.
A new discovery at Cern's LHCb experiment reveals differences in the decay rates of matter baryons and their antimatter counterparts, providing insights into why the universe is dominated by matter and not antimatter, and hinting at potential new physics beyond the standard model.
Physicists used antimatter, supercomputers, and giant magnets to resolve a 20-year-old mystery about the muon's magnetism, which could have indicated new physics related to dark matter. Recent experiments and simulations have clarified the discrepancy, but the question of potential new particles like the dark photon remains open, offering clues about dark matter.
The ALICE collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider has found the first evidence of antihyperhelium-4, the heaviest antimatter hypernucleus observed at the LHC, with a significance of 3.5 standard deviations. This discovery, based on 2018 lead-lead collision data, supports the statistical hadronisation model's predictions and contributes to understanding the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe. The findings also include evidence of antihyperhydrogen-4 and confirm equal production of matter and antimatter at LHC energies.
Scientists at CERN have observed antimatter particles falling downwards due to gravity for the first time, confirming Einstein's theory of relativity. The experiment definitively rules out the possibility that gravity repels antimatter upwards, which would have challenged our understanding of the universe. Antimatter, the counterpart to visible matter, is believed to have been produced in equal amounts during the Big Bang, but its scarcity remains a mystery. The study involved trapping antihydrogen atoms in a magnetic bottle and observing their behavior as the strength of the magnets was reduced. This milestone marks the beginning of further research to understand how antimatter behaves in relation to normal matter.
A new experiment conducted at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, confirms that antiparticles, such as anti-hydrogen, fall in a gravitational field just like regular matter. The experiment involved suspending anti-hydrogen atoms in a magnetic field and slowly reducing the field, causing the atoms to drift downward at the same rate as regular atoms. The result aligns with Einstein's theory of general relativity, which states that all forms of matter and energy respond equally to gravity. The findings provide further evidence that antimatter behaves similarly to ordinary matter, but the mystery of why the universe contains more matter than antimatter remains unsolved.
Researchers using Japan's Subaru telescope have measured the amount and type of helium in distant galaxies, providing insights into the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem. The Big Bang should have created an equal amount of matter and antimatter, which would have annihilated each other, leaving the universe empty. However, the presence of matter suggests an imbalance. The study suggests that the number of neutrinos in the early universe was greater than the number of antineutrinos, potentially explaining the asymmetry. This finding offers a possible explanation for why the universe exists.