A New Clue to Explain Existence (Matter/Antimatter)

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captdude

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Here is the beggining of - and a a link to - a very interesting article I would like to share with the community. :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/scien ... osmos.html

By DENNIS OVERBYE
Published: May 17, 2010
Physicists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory are reporting that they have discovered a new clue that could help unravel one of the biggest mysteries of cosmology: why the universe is composed of matter and not its evil-twin opposite, antimatter. If confirmed, the finding portends fundamental discoveries at the new Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva, as well as a possible explanation for our own existence.
In a mathematically perfect universe, we would be less than dead; we would never have existed. According to the basic precepts of Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been created in the Big Bang and then immediately annihilated each other in a blaze of lethal energy, leaving a big fat goose egg with which to make to make stars, galaxies and us. And yet we exist, and physicists (among others) would dearly like to know why.
Sifting data from collisions of protons and antiprotons at Fermilab’s Tevatron, which until last winter was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world, the team, known as the DZero collaboration, found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.
 
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ramparts

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Re: A New Clue to Explain Existence

Very interesting, I hadn't heard about these results yet. I'll have to go read up on it. Thanks for posting!
 
W

weeman

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Re: A New Clue to Explain Existence

So would these results be a killing blow to supersymmetry? Or just that symmetry does not dictate all events of physics?
 
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ramparts

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Re: A New Clue to Explain Existence

This wouldn't affect supersymmetry in any way, as far as I know. Supersymmetry is a very specific type of symmetry, not one saying that everything is symmetric or something. (Supersymmetry is the symmetry that every particle has a superpartner particle - for example, the neutralino to the neutrino.) And obviously not everything in the universe is symmetric so such a theory wouldn't make much sense anyway ;)
 
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