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<ul type="square">From the PPARC-website: <b>Dramatic difference discovered in behaviour of matter and antimatter</b><br /><br />Today, August 2nd 2004, particle physicists from the UK and around the world working on the BABAR experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in the USA, announced exciting new results demonstrating a dramatic difference in the behaviour of matter and antimatter. Their discovery may help to explain why the Universe we live in is dominated by matter, rather than containing equal parts matter and anti-matter.<br />...<br />By sifting through the decays of more than 200 million pairs of B and anti-B mesons, experimenters have discovered striking matter-antimatter asymmetry. "We found 910 examples of the B meson decaying to a kaon and a pion, but only 696 examples for the anti-B", explained Giorgi. "The new measurement is very much a result of the outstanding performance of SLAC's PEP-II accelerator and the efficiency of the BABAR detector. The accelerator is now operating at 3 times its design performance and BABAR is able to record about 98% of collisions."<br />...<br />"This is a strong, convincing signal of direct CP violation in B decays, a type of matter-antimatter asymmetry which was expected to exist but has not been observed before. With this discovery the full pattern of matter-antimatter asymmetries is coming together into a coherent picture...<br />...<br />Dan Bowerman, a member of the BABAR team from Imperial College adds "When the universe began with the big bang, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts. However, all observations indicate that we live in a universe made only of matter. So we have to ask, what happened to the antimatter? The work at BABAR is bringing us closer to answering this question."<br /><br />Subtle differences between the behaviour of matter and antimatter must be responsible for the matter-antimatter imbalance that dev</ul> <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p> </p><p>***</p> </div>