antimatter – Quanta Magazine

An Antimatter Experiment Shows Surprises Near Absolute Zero

Charlie Wood — Wed, 16 Mar 2022 16:00:44 +0000

For decades, researchers have toyed with antimatter while searching for new laws of physics. These laws would come in the form of forces or other phenomena that would strongly favor matter over antimatter, or vice versa. Yet physicists have found nothing amiss, no conclusive sign that antimatter particles — which are just the oppositely charged twins of familiar particles — obey different rules.

Source

Is the Great Neutrino Puzzle Pointing to Multiple Missing Particles?

Thomas Lewton — Thu, 28 Oct 2021 14:39:10 +0000

Years of conflicting neutrino measurements have led physicists to propose a “dark sector” of invisible particles — one that could simultaneously explain dark matter, the puzzling expansion of the universe, and other mysteries.

The post Is the Great Neutrino Puzzle Pointing to Multiple Missing Particles? first appeared on Quanta Magazine

Decades-Long Quest Reveals Details of the Proton’s Inner Antimatter

Natalie Wolchover — Wed, 24 Feb 2021 16:00:43 +0000

It often goes unmentioned that protons, the positively charged matter particles at the center of atoms, are part antimatter. We learn in school that a proton is a bundle of three elementary particles called quarks — two “up” quarks and a “down” quark, whose electric charges (+2/3 and −1/3, respectively) combine to give the proton its charge of +1. But that simplistic picture glosses over a far...

Source

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 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