Physicists Uncover Clues to the Balance of Matter and Antimatter in the Universe

Physicists may have uncovered new important clues about the nature of our universe. They've made important discoveries concerning Bs meson particles, which may explain why the universe contains more matter than antimatter.

In this case, the researchers examined data from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) Collaboration, which is a multinational experiment that seeks to understand what happened after the Big Bang and what caused matter to survive and flourish in the universe. Based at CERN, LHCb involves more than 800 scientists and engineers from all over the world.

"Many international experiments are interested in the Bs meson because it oscillates between a matter particle and an antimatter particle," said Sheldon Stone, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Understanding its properties may shed light on charge-parity [CP] violation, which refers to the balance of matter and antimatter in the universe and is one of the biggest challenges of particle physics."

About 14 billion years ago, energy coalesced to form equal quantities of matter and antimatter. As the universe cooled and expanded, its composition changed. Antimatter disappeared after the Big Bang, leaving behind matter to create stars and galaxies.

Yet how did this happen? Researchers believe that the answer lies in the Bs meson. This particle contains an antiquark and a strange quark and is bound together by a strong interaction. Using the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) and the DZero (D0), scientists conducted a series of experiments. In the end, they found that the matter-antimatter oscillations of the Bs meson deviated from the standard model of physics, but the uncertainties of their results were too high to make any solid conclusions.

That said, the findings do show that the difference between the Bs and anti-Bs meson is just as the standard model predicted. These findings may have implications moving forward when it comes to particle physics.

The findings were announced at a workshop at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.