What happened at the beginning of the universe, in the very first moments?
But scientists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland arent giving up.
There are also antimatter partners of all quarks and leptons which are identical particles apart from an opposite charge.
The Standard Model is experimentally verified to an incredible degree of accuracy but has some significant shortcomings.
13.8 billion years ago, the universe was created in the Big Bang.
The theory suggests this event should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter.
Yet today, the universeis almost entirely made up of matter.
And thats lucky because antimatter and matter annihilate in a flash of energy when they meet.
One of the biggest open questions in physics today is why is there more matter than antimatter.
Were there processes at play in the early universe that favored matter over antimatter?
40% off TNW Conference!
In this process, the quark turns into an anti-quark and the anti-quark turns into a quark.
It can do this because of quantum mechanics, whichgoverns the universeon the tiniest of scales.
It is only when you measure its state that it picks one of them.
Cern
Our latest discovery,announced at the Charm conference, changes this.
So it will typically disappear long before this oscillation occurs, posing a serious experimental challenge.
The key is precision.
The measurement, therefore, had to reach record precision on several fronts.
This is made possible by the unprecedented amount of charm particles produced at the LHC.
But why is this important?
It has already been shown that some unstable particles decay in a different way to their corresponding antimatter particle.
This may have contributedto the abundance of matter in the universe withprevious discoveriesof it leading to Nobel Prizes.
We also want to find CP-violation in the process of mixing.
Knowing the oscillation rate is a key step towards this goal.
Meanwhile, theoretical physicists are working on new calculations to interpret this result.
The LHCb physics program will also be complemented by theBelle-II experimentin Japan.
These are exciting prospects for investigating matter-antimatter asymmetry and the oscillations of mesons.
