Fermilab Finds New Mechanism for Matter's Dominance over Antimatter

"While colliding protons and antiprotons, which creates neutral B mesons, we would expect that when they decay we will see equal amounts of matter and antimatter," Denisov says. "For whatever reason, there are more negative muons, which are matter, than positive muons, which are antimatter." According to DZero member Gustaaf Brooijmans, a physicist at Columbia University, "We observe an asymmetry that is close to 1 percent." ( 3.2 sigma exactly )




If it turns out that a new particle is in fact responsible for the odd tendency of B mesons to favor matter over antimatter, it might be unmasked in the unprecedented high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC. But don't count out the workhorse stateside, which has a head start of many years—and reams of well-understood data—on its more powerful European counterpart. Brooijmans says his "gut feeling" is that such a particle should be observable at the LHC. "And who knows?" he adds. "It might be accessible at the Tevatron."


Fermilab Finds New Mechanism for Matter's Dominance over Antimatter

Breakthrough in the matter–antimatter divide