05-29-2012, 09:42 AM
http://scienceblog.com/54685/landmark-ca...is-formed/
Quote:...Examining the decay of the kaon offers insights into fundamental problems in physics.
“This calculation brings us closer to answering fundamental questions about how matter formed in the early universe and why we, and everything else we observe today, are made of matter and not anti-matter,” says Blum, a co-author of the paper.
Anti-matter is described in this analogy from CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research: Imagine stamping a coin from a hot metal sheet. You are left with a coin and a hole – the hole could be called an “anti-coin.” Similarly, when energy transforms into matter, a particle of matter and an anti-particle are produced.
When the universe began, did it start out with more particles of matter than anti-matter? That is the way the question was framed by another co-author, Taku Izubuchi of the RIKEN BNL Research Center and Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, NY. Or, he asked, were the two symmetrical and was there another mechanism that resulted in more matter than anti-matter?
The asymmetry of matter and anti-matter is one of the unsolved problems of physics. The universe today is composed almost exclusively of matter with virtually no anti-matter to be found.
The current paper explains in more detail the subatomic particle decay that was first reported in a 1964 Nobel Prize-winning experiment at Brookhaven. That experiment showed the first evidence of a lack of symmetry between particles and their anti-particles, or matter and anti-matter...