They do this by accelerating protons into a sample of carbon, which then spew out muon neutrinos in a beam that's aimed at Super-Kamiokande. The experiment involves creating a beam of muon neutrinos and firing it from the Japan Proton Accelerator Research Complex (JPARC) through the solid Earth 295 kilometers away to the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector.
The results aren't rock solid, but they're very interesting. There may indeed by an asymmetry there, so that's where scientists have concentrated their efforts.Īnd here's where we get to the very interesting part: Scientists with the T2K collaboration just announced they may have measured this symmetry violation in neutrinos. One kind of neutrino can spontaneously transform into another kind as it travels through space.Īnd the reason I'm mentioning them here is that when you go through the incredibly complex equations governing neutrinos and their antimatter equivalents, you find a hint that they might not act the same. They also come in three different flavors, called muon, electron, and tau neutrinos. It has a lot of weird properties, like being able to pass through a lot of normal matter as if it's not there it just doesn't interact with matter much. There's another kind of subatomic particle called a neutrino. OK, let's take a side trip here for a sec. The detailed physics is interesting - there's a fantastic explanation of this at the DAEδALUS experiment site - but you don't need it all to understand the next bit, which is what scientists are doing to find it. Scientists have been searching for this asymmetry for a long time. It must be that our laws of matter/antimatter symmetry are somehow violated, that antimatter is not exactly like matter in some way. Not much, but enough to account for all the galaxies, stars, planets, people, and cups of Earl Grey tea we see today after all the other pairs annihilated. For every billion or so pairs of matter/antimatter particles, there was one leftover matter particle. There shouldn't be any matter or antimatter at all in the cosmos. You see, according to the laws of physics as we understand them, when the Universe was very young - just a few minutes old - and its temperature dropped enough as it expanded, it should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter.īut if that were true, every particle would've met its antiparticle, and ka blam. Credit: Phil PlaitĪnd that's a problem (besides ruining a rave). Antimatter isn't evil, but you don't want to get it together with matter.