At the beginning of its existence, during the process known as the Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were generated that must have annihilated each other, which means that you should not be reading this article around 13.8 billion years later.
One plausible explanation is that some crucial difference between matter and antimatter prevented this catastrophe; however, subsequent research at CERN in Switzerland found that both particles appear completely identical.
“ All of our observations find complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe shouldn’t actually exist. There must be an asymmetry somewhere, but we just don’t understand where the difference is. What’s the source? of the breaking of symmetry? “asks Christian Smorra , co-author of the work published in the journal ‘Nature’ in October 2017.
As far as we know, the Big Bang produced an equal amount of matter and antimatter , the two forms of matter that make up almost all of the visible part of the universe and its elusive twin mirror. Since when matter meets antimatter they usually destroy each other with a flash of pure energy , it means that there must be something we don’t know yet that prevented this from happening when the universe was born.
The magnetic properties of antiprotons, the antimatter versions of common protons, were one of the last hopes for finding an imbalance between the two types of matter. But after making the most accurate measurements possible, the scientists say they found no discrepancies.
Because antimatter cannot be physically contained, the researchers used charged particle Penning traps to hold antiprotons at incredibly low temperatures, shrouded in magnetic and electric fields. The team broke the record for antimatter storage: 405 days in total and measurements 350 times more accurate than previous readings.
They got the most accurate measurement ever made of the magnetic moment of an antiproton (the antiparticle of the proton), a number that measures how a particle reacts to a magnetic force, and they have discovered that it is exactly the same as that of the proton. For those interested, the measurement of the magnetic force was -2.7928473441 nuclear magnetons, (μN) that coincide with the positive value of the proton.
Solve the problem?
No way. This result only adds to this ancient mystery. There has to be some reason we’re all here living and breathing, because we’ve already found that, at least, it seems we don’t live in a big Matrix- like computer simulation.
Scientists continue to conduct future experiments with the goal of studying the magnetic properties of antiprotons in greater detail and investigating whether gravity could be the key point between matter and antimatter.
“By updating the experiment with several new innovations and techniques, we believe there is still room for improvement, and in the future, after the CERN update that is expected to end in 2021, we will be able to achieve an improvement of at least tenfold,” says Smorra. .
Will we then solve the mystery? We hope so, because there must be an asymmetry somewhere, we just haven’t located it yet.
Referencia: A parts-per-billion measurement of the antiproton magnetic moment. C. Smorra, S. Sellner, M. J. Borchert, J. A. Harrington, T. Higuchi, H. Nagahama, T. Tanaka, A. Mooser, G. Schneider, M. Bohman, K. Blaum, Y. Matsuda, C. Ospelkaus, W. Quint, J. Walz, Y. Yamazaki & S. Ulmer. Nature 2017 DOI: 10.1038/nature24048.
