Emily Chan
So, they used a miniature Big Bang simulator to generate antimatter particles and used the RHIC to hurl billions of heavy ions at each other.
This resembled the conditions from which the elements of our universe emerged, combined and decayed.
To pinpoint new particles from the stream of particles, the researchers looked for the tracks ions left behind as they decayed or transformed into other particles.
When they retraced the routes of the particles from billions of collision events, they found about 16 antihyperhydrogen-4 nuclei.
Hyperhydrogen-4 and its counterpart, antihyperhydrogen-4, both seemed to blink in and out of existence very quickly.
But, the scientists did not find a major difference between their lifetimes, meaning that the current descriptions of the two types of particles are accurate.
“If we were to see a violation of [this particular] symmetry, basically we’d have to throw a lot of what we know about physics out the window,” Emilie Duckworth, a study co-author and a doctoral student from Kent State University, said.
Moving forward, the research team plans to compare the masses of particles and antiparticles in the hopes of shedding some light on the origins of our universe.
The recent findings were published in Nature.
