Submission + - Atom Smashers Get an Antimatter Surprise (io9.com)
suraj.sun writes: The Large Hadron Collider is constantly on the hunt for "new physics" — discoveries that confound and expand our current understanding of the universe... and it may have found one in the decay patterns of a subatomic particle and its antimatter counterpart.
Specifically, particles called D-mesons appear to decay in a slightly different way than their antiparticles, and this seemingly small finding could explain why the early universe became dominated by matter instead of antimatter. According to project physicist Matthew Charles, the results have a statistical certainty of 3.5 sigma — meaning there's a 99.95% chance that these results will hold up, but still short of the 5 sigma level needed to declare this a formal discovery.
However, the team still has a huge amount of data still to work through, so there's an excellent chance that we'll know one way or the other about this result in the near future.
http://io9.com/5859845/the-large-hadron-collider-may-have-discovered-why-we-dont-live-in-a-universe-of-antimatter
Specifically, particles called D-mesons appear to decay in a slightly different way than their antiparticles, and this seemingly small finding could explain why the early universe became dominated by matter instead of antimatter. According to project physicist Matthew Charles, the results have a statistical certainty of 3.5 sigma — meaning there's a 99.95% chance that these results will hold up, but still short of the 5 sigma level needed to declare this a formal discovery.
However, the team still has a huge amount of data still to work through, so there's an excellent chance that we'll know one way or the other about this result in the near future.
http://io9.com/5859845/the-large-hadron-collider-may-have-discovered-why-we-dont-live-in-a-universe-of-antimatter
