Thanks to the experiment “A Large Ion Collider Experiment” (ALICE), the LHC particle accelerator and collider located at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has confirmed the existence of a fundamental symmetry of nature through precise measurements of mass and electric charge of particles . The study, carried out by a team of scientists from the University of Sao Paulo and the University of Campinas (Brazil), has been published in the journal Nature Physics .
ALICE records high-energy collisions between lead ions at the LHC, allowing the study of matter under extreme conditions of density and temperature . With it, the researchers have been able to verify the fundamental CPT symmetry in charge conjugation (all particles are replaced by their corresponding antiparticles); parity inversion (the process spatial parity is inverted); and time inversion (in which the sense of time is reversed) between the nuclei of the particles and their antiparticles.
“After the Big Bang, for each particle of matter an antiparticle was created. In particle physics, a topic of great importance is the one that aims to know if all the laws of physics exhibit a specific type of symmetry, the so-called CPT, and the measurements suggest that it does indeed exist: a fundamental symmetry between the nuclei and anticores ”, explains Marcelo Gameiro, co-author of the study.
According to the scientists, these measurements of mass and electric charge made during the symmetry experiment, combined with other studies, will help physicists to determine, among the many theories that exist about the fundamental laws of the Universe, which are the most feasible .
“These laws describe the nature of all the interactions between matter, so it is important to know that physical interactions are not altered when the charge of the particles is reversed, by altering their parity by inverting their coordinates in space and by reversing time. . The laws of physics would remain the same under these conditions, ”says Gameiro.
