matter-antimatter asymmetry – Quanta Magazine

Neutrino Asymmetry Passes Critical Threshold

Natalie Wolchover — Wed, 15 Apr 2020 15:00:23 +0000

Physicists have detected the strongest evidence yet of a behavioral difference between elementary particles called neutrinos and their mirror-image twins, antineutrinos. The asymmetry could be the key to why so much more matter than antimatter arose during the Big Bang — further explaining why anything at all exists today, since matter and antimatter in equal portions would have mutually...

Source

Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math

Natalie Wolchover — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 19:15:06 +0000

After breakfast one morning in August, the mathematician Terence Tao opened an email from three physicists he didn’t know. The trio explained that they’d stumbled across a simple formula that, if true, established an unexpected relationship between some of the most basic and important objects in linear algebra. The formula “looked too good to be true,” said Tao, who is a professor at the...

Source

Neutrinos Suggest Solution to Mystery of Universe’s Existence

Katia Moskvitch — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 15:36:44 +0000

From above, you might mistake the hole in the ground for a gigantic elevator shaft. Instead, it leads to an experiment that might reveal why matter didn’t disappear in a puff of radiation shortly after the Big Bang. I’m at the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex, or J-PARC — a remote and well-guarded government facility in Tokai, about an hour’s train ride north of Tokyo. The experiment here...

Source

Neutrinos Hint of Matter-Antimatter Rift

Natalie Wolchover — Thu, 28 Jul 2016 16:05:16 +0000

In the same underground observatory in Japan where, 18 years ago, neutrinos were first seen oscillating from one “flavor” to another — a landmark discovery that earned two physicists the 2015 Nobel Prize — a tiny anomaly has begun to surface in the neutrinos’ oscillations that could herald an answer to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: why matter dominates over antimatter in the universe.

Source

Search Escalates for Key to Why Matter Exists

Natalie Wolchover — Tue, 15 Oct 2013 13:19:32 +0000

It felt like the Apollo control room seconds before the moon landing. For the approximately 60 physicists crowded into a conference room at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, on June 14, this was the moment of truth. After nearly a decade of work, the result of their painstaking search for one of the rarest radioactive decay processes in the universe — if it exists — was...

Source