POLL: The Matter-Antimatter Mystery

[doublehelix]

Newly announced results from an ongoing particle physics experiment has revealed that after eight years of atom-smashing, scientists have discovered a 1 percent imbalance between matter and its fundamental opposite – antimatter.

But scientists still need to do more research to see if the difference, which showed a bit more matter than antimatter, can fully explain why the universe, stars and planets – and humans – exist. Matter and antimatter destroy each other on contact, so our universe would never have formed had there not been more regular matter than antimatter, scientists said.

What do you think? Weigh in on whether you think scientists will be able to explain the matter-antimatter puzzle prove our universe should exist.

More stories:

• Why We Exist: Matter Wins Battle Over Antimatter
• The Strangest Things in Space
• What is Antimatter
• Space Station Experiment to Hunt Antimatter Galaxies

 

[elroy_jetson]

The more we learn, the more we'll know! The benefits of unlocking the secrets of matter and antimatter would be fantastic for our future space faring civilization!

 

[ramparts]

And in fact, having an understanding of the imbalance between matter and anti-matter would interesting and worthwhile even before it became useful for building stuff!

 

[BoJangles2]

Although I think all these advances are ultimately worth while (if not just blatantly interesting) I really think that our universe is largely an indeterminate system which comes with a hard ceiling of what we could ever determine as fact, the rest is just speculation.

IE there are some topics that I think science has a great understanding of; however (and unfortunately) I think there are others that will remain pure speculation for ever.

Its like science is looking at a cosmological crime scene (well after the fact) trying to piece together what happened, and although we can get close to understanding the culprits, it just maybe the case we will never know the true causes and affects by looking through our fundamentally limited viewing glass.

On saying that, keep up the good work science

 

[trumptor]

Could it be possible that every particle that comes into existence has a 50/50 chance of being regular matter or antimatter and the outcome just being chance, just like flipping a coin? With gazzilions of particles being formed wouldn't chance allow or even make it likely for there to be alittle more of one or the other?

 

[MeteorWayne]

That's what this says except it's 50.0000000000001% matter and 49.9999999999999% antimatter.

 

[trumptor]

That's incredible, considering that all the billions of galaxies have billions of stars each, and every one of the stars is composed of almost unimaginable mass. And all of this is just that .00000000001% of the matter that wasn't annihilated by antimatter? That's some energy created!

Is it possible that during the annihilation that some antimatter was flung out into the expansion along with the matter, never having had a chance to interact with regular matter? If this is the case would it then be possible that there may be whole galaxies and even galactic clusters composed of antimatter in distant parts of the universe?

 

[a_lost_packet_]

Some info on what was already posted about the Tevetron experiment:

Clue to Antimatter Conundrum: Physicists Find Evidence for Significant Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry[/url]":3obg4v24]

ScienceDaily (May 21, 2010) — Scientists of the DZero collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have announced that they have found evidence for significant violation of matter-antimatter symmetry in the behavior of particles containing bottom quarks beyond what is expected in the current theory, the Standard Model of particle physics.

The new result, submitted for publication in Physical Review D by the DZero collaboration, an international team of 500 physicists, indicates a one percent difference between the production of pairs of muons and pairs of antimuons in the decay of B mesons produced in high-energy collisions at Fermilab's Tevatron particle collider.

The dominance of matter that we observe in the universe is possible only if there are differences in the behavior of particles and antiparticles. Although physicists have observed such differences (called "CP violation") in particle behavior for decades, these known differences are much too small to explain the observed dominance of matter over antimatter in the universe and are fully consistent with the Standard Model. If confirmed by further observations and analysis, the effect seen by DZero physicists could represent another step towards understanding the observed matter dominance by pointing to new physics phenomena beyond what we know today....

...
But the world around is made of matter only and antiparticles can only be produced at colliders, in nuclear reactions or cosmic rays. "What happened to the antimatter?" is one of the central questions of 21st-century particle physics....

.."Many of us felt goose bumps when we saw the result," said Stefan Soldner-Rembold, co-spokesperson of DZero. "We knew we were seeing something beyond what we have seen before and beyond what current theories can explain."...

Basically, it's this:

If what we think we know is true, matter and anti-matter should have been created in equal amounts at the moment of the Big Bang. For there not to be as much anti-matter as matter present in today's universe there must have been a small asymmetry there. In other words, while Symmetry is one of the dominant principles in physics, the matter/anti-matter conundrum would most easily have been caused by an asymmetrical operation. A very strange thing as there isn't a reason "why" according to what we think we know...

Nobody has been able to figure out what would have caused the asymmetry. What we do know wouldn't yield enough difference between the two. It should not be yet, here we are, going about our daily lives and curiously not spontaneously exploding when we greet each other and shake hands..

Yet, the researchers at DZero may have stumbled across the asymmetry operator in the Matter/Anti-Matter Conundrum - new evidence for deviance in the decay rate of the B meson that is not accounted for in current theory. It was discovered that the B meson will decay into matter 1% more frequently than into antimatter..

That 1% difference might be large enough to create a relatively uncomplicated and much less stressful existence for mankind in today's Universe than it could have turned out to be.

That's it, in a nutshell.
Info on DZero - DZero

 

[Chairshot215]

I voted yes in the sense that we will eventually figure out that we really had no idea what we had been talking about and need to redefined the entire question.

 

[acsinnz]

Hi all,
I think that 1% more matter than anti-matter is probably about correct for normal light materials with atomic numbers under 26. For heavier materials I would expect that the number of neutrons would far outnumber the protons and thus even higher percentages will occur on planetary and interspace materials only.
But what about the material that stars are made of? They may well have a surplus of anti-matter which will re-balance the equation at the big bang creation. If the stars are made of anti-matter then no wonder they want to loose energy rather than absorb it!
There is an electrical difference as well between stars and planets which part2 of the alternative electric magnoflux universe tries to explain.
CliveS

 

[MeteorWayne]

Hi all,
I think that 1% more matter than anti-matter is probably about correct for normal light materials with atomic numbers under 26. For heavier materials I would expect that the number of neutrons would far outnumber the protons and thus even higher percentages will occur on planetary and interspace materials only.
But what about the material that stars are made of? They may well have a surplus of anti-matter which will re-balance the equation at the big bang creation. If the stars are made of anti-matter then no wonder they want to loose energy rather than absorb it!
There is an electrical difference as well between stars and planets which part2 of the alternative electric magnoflux universe tries to explain.
CliveS

Yeah, OK.

Protons and Neutrons have nothing to do with matter/antimatter. There are antiprotons. There are antineutrons.

An electrical difference has nothing to do with matter/antimatter.

As far as the "alternative electric magnoflux universe" you will soon find this post moved to The Unexplained.

Meteor Wayne

 

[Garson007]

Is this saying what I think it's saying? That we can actually "create" energy/matter? That is... in violation of so many theories it's scary.

 

[MeteorWayne]

Not sure what "it" you mean here with so many posts above.

You can't create matter or energy in our Universe, however you can convert from one to the other.

 

[Garson007]

Not sure what "it" you mean here with so many posts above.

You can't create matter or energy in our Universe, however you can convert from one to the other.

This is my understanding: In the standard model the creation of anti-matter results in equal and opposite amount of creation in matter - so that the net result of "creation" is zero. Now if said creation resulted in more matter than antimatter then cancelling out the two would not result in a net-effect of zero, but rather a result slightly biased towards matter. Therefore matter is created.

 

[MeteorWayne]

Well at the moment of the big bang, both matter and antimatter were created. We are the excess matter left over after things almost cancelled out.

Since then, no energy has been created, just converted between matter and energy..


At least that's our current understanding.

MW

 

[ramparts]

Not sure what "it" you mean here with so many posts above.

You can't create matter or energy in our Universe, however you can convert from one to the other.

This is my understanding: In the standard model the creation of anti-matter results in equal and opposite amount of creation in matter - so that the net result of "creation" is zero. Now if said creation resulted in more matter than antimatter then cancelling out the two would not result in a net-effect of zero, but rather a result slightly biased towards matter. Therefore matter is created.

If you create a particle and its antiparticle, they'll annihilate but that doesn't mean the creation is "equal and opposite" - that is, you still have the same "problem" of creation ex nihilo. Think about it like this - if you create equal amounts of matter and antimatter, they'll eventually annihilate and leave you with a bath of energy in photons. It's not a zero-sum game. So you're basically asking "where did all the stuff in the Universe come from?" which is obviously very tricky but exists regardless of whether or not matter and antimatter are asymmetric.

 

[Keln]

By definition a meson is a quark-antiquark pair. When a meson decays, it does so into a particle-antiparticle pair. The problem is that what has been observed is not always the case, and that questions our understanding of the model. The latest finding shows it to be unquestionably so (assuming it is accurate) with 1% (a relatively huge bias) more matter than antimatter, when it should be created in pairs from B-meson decay. Instead of thinking about it in terms of chance (like a 50/50 chance of matter or antimatter), think instead in terms of a system and its components. If a system is made of an A-type component and a B-type component, one does not expect it to yield two A-type components when it is taken apart. So this suggest that many antiquarks are transforming into quarks when a meson decays.

 

[acsinnz]

Saw a programme on Paul Dirac on the TV introduced as a great Brit inventor. Amazing!! And only 3 years after Pauli first started quantum wave mechanics in 1925. I wonder if anti-matter is magnetic at all? anyone know?
CliveS

 

[MeteorWayne]

Antimatter has the same properties as matter, so if antimolecules exist, they would be magnetic just as regular matter is.

 

[orionrider]

I have read in the French "Science & Vie" magazine that there are ongoing studies to measure the effect of gravity on antimatter. The postulate is that if gravity was found to be inverted or at least different for antimatter it would explain many discrepancies in the standard model.
See this link at the Max Planck Institute: http://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/kellerbauer/en/projects/antimatter.htm

How do we know that half of the observable universe is not made of antimatter?
If antimatter repels matter, we could be looking at antimatter galaxies all over the place

Fascinating stuff

 

[MeteorWayne]

I have read in the French "Science & Vie" magazine that there are ongoing studies to measure the effect of gravity on antimatter. The postulate is that if gravity was found to be inverted or at least different for antimatter it would explain many discrepancies in the standard model.

[/quote]

Nowhere is such a postulate stated. They are saying only that the experiment will allow precise measurements.

 

[orionrider]

Right, not in the link I posted, which explains the experiment, not the underlying reason for it. But they did elaborate in the French article. I also found it briefly stated on wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitatio ... antimatter

Supporters argue that antimatter antigravity would explain several important physics questions. Besides the already mentioned prediction of CP violation, they argue that it explains two cosmological paradoxes. The first is the apparent local lack of antimatter: by theory antimatter and matter would repel each other gravitationally, forming separate matter and antimatter galaxies. These galaxies would also tend to repel one another, thereby preventing possible collisions and annihilations.
This same galactic repulsion is also endorsed as a potential explanation to the observation of a flatly accelerating universe.

It seems plausible enough to invest millions in order to check that antimatter falls down, like everything else...

 

[PAUL556]

IF ANTIMATTER is ture
then we all have a opposite and this would explain that when you die you become your antimatter and this would also explain you can only be one or the other dead or alive so when you are alive you are mater when you are dead you become antimatter so maybe heaven is maid of antimatter and earth is made of matter
it just cross my mind im not saying its true
if there is any sciencetist out there tell me what you think about it is it possible

 

[kk434]

Dont want to get into a religious debate but when the Bible describes the creation its a litle like big bang theory written by the antients. Firsth noting/darkness, then light. sounds like the big bang. Huge struggle between good and evil and good prevails, battle beween matter and antimatter matter wins. Finally humans are created. All this is very speculative but the main idea sounds like the same. To get to your question, I dont think that there exists a copy of you of antimatter, however a ghost made of neutrinos would make some sence, both invisible to human eye, both can pass trough mattter.

 

[MeteorWayne]

IF ANTIMATTER is ture
then we all have a opposite and this would explain that when you die you become your antimatter and this would also explain you can only be one or the other dead or alive so when you are alive you are mater when you are dead you become antimatter so maybe heaven is maid of antimatter and earth is made of matter
it just cross my mind im not saying its true
if there is any sciencetist out there tell me what you think about it is it possible

There's no reason anything you said need be true. Antimatter does exist. That's no debatable. That does not mean at all that antimatter planets or people exist, though they might. Even if they do, there's no reason they would be in any way related to us.