LHC Reveals Matter-Antimatter Decay Discrepancy, Offering Clues to Universe's Existence

Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) have potentially uncovered new clues about the universe's survival. The research hints at a surprising difference in the decays of particles called baryons and their antimatter twins. This discovery, made at CERN, could help explain why matter didn't annihilate with antimatter after the Big Bang. According to models, the Big Bang should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, leading to total annihilation. However, the existence of stars, planets, and life indicates that something prevented this. CERN physicists analyzed LHC data, finding evidence of differences in how matter and antimatter behave. In theory, all particles should adhere to charge-parity (CP) symmetry, where inverting the charge and spatial coordinates of all particles should not alter the laws of physics. However, some interactions violate this symmetry. A 1964 experiment found CP violations in K mesons, and later experiments found similar violations in other particles, but not enough to account for the rarity of antimatter. The new study identified CP violations in baryons, focusing on beauty-lambda baryons (Λ) and their antiparticles. If CP symmetry holds, Λ and anti-Λ particles should decay at the same rate. Researchers on the LHCb collaboration analyzed tens of thousands of decays captured between 2009 and 2018, finding a difference of around 2.45 percent between matter and antimatter decays. "It took over 80,000 baryon decays for us to see matter-antimatter asymmetry with this class of particles for the first time," said Vincenzo Vagnoni, spokesperson for the LHCb collaboration. This breakthrough could provide clues to new forces and particles, helping to solve the enigma of why antimatter didn't annihilate all matter in the Universe. "The more systems in which we observe CP violations and the more precise the measurements are, the more opportunities we have to test the Standard Model and to look for physics beyond it," Vagnoni added.