Researchers have found evidence of a difference between the behavior of neutrinos and antineutrinos. This, in turn, could help demonstrate why there is so much matter in relation to antimatter in the universe – and, in turn, how everything around us was formed.
One of the biggest challenges in understanding the universe arises from the fact that big Bang having created the universe with equal amounts of antimatter and matter. Observations of the cosmos, however, show that it is made of matter – and researchers have been struggling to explain where the lost antimatter may have gone.
To explain the existence of the universe, scientists think that there must be something different about matter and antimatter, which would explain why the universe seems to favor one over the other. Innovation can reveal where this asymmetry came from.
The new findings come from the T2K experiment in Japan. There, researchers from a detector observe neutrinos and antineutrinos that are generated nearly 300 kilometers away at Japan’s Proton Accelerator Research Complex.
As they travel between the two, and across the Earth, the particles alternate between different properties known as “flavors”. The new research has shown that neutrinos and antineutrinos do this by looking at the taste the different particles had when they were created.
After nine years of such observations, the experiment found that there is something different between the fundamental particles, which could help explain the difference that is seen across the universe, although they warn that more research is needed to confirm the findings.
Laura Kormos, senior professor of physics at Lancaster University, head of Lancaster’s neutrino physics group and T2K researcher, said:
Our data continues to suggest that nature prefers almost the maximum value of asymmetry for this process. It would be like Mother Nature to have these tiny particles, apparently insignificant and difficult to study, as being the engine of the universe’s existence.
If confirmed, and more experiments planned ahead, the discovery could help find the so-called missing antimatter, which intrigues scientists, as they seek an explanation of the strange incompatibility across the universe and the origin of the cosmos.
The new study, “Constraint on the matter – antimatter symmetry-violating phase in neutrino oscillations”(Restrictions on the phase of violation of matter-antimatter symmetry in neutrino oscillations) was published in the latest edition of Nature.
