where did the antimatter go? answer it urgent
Answers
Scientists have long posited that slight differences in how matter and antimatter behave could have led matter to win out in the moments after the Big Bang. But finding those asymmetries has proved difficult. Now, physicists with Japan’s T2K experiment have published data that move us closer to an answer.
Explanation:
The transition of a muon neutrino to an electron neutrino happens at a higher rate than that of a muon antineutrino to an electron antineutrino, says Mark Hartz, a particle physicist at Canada’s York University and co-author of a recent Nature paper on the T2K data. The data provide further evidence that there could be some slight asymmetries between normal matter and antimatter, perhaps enough to explain why the universe today is almost exclusively made of matter.
But Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, the principal investigator of the AMS experiment, says we need more data to truly say antimatter isn’t out there somewhere.
“This neutrino experiment only says, ‘From Earth, we observe in space more matter than antimatter,’ ” he says. “It does not say, ‘Antimatter disappeared.’ ”
Ting’s views may not represent the majority opinion among scientists, but the physicist is undaunted: “If you don’t look, then really you will never know.”