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Using a vast amount of data from the charm mesons generated at the LHC, the scientists measured particles to a difference of 1 x 10^-38 grams.
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It seeks to examine why we live in a world full of matter, but seemingly no antimatter, according to CERN. The large-scale undertaking that produced the charm meson data is called the Large Hadron Collider beauty experiment. More specifically, a charm meson typically has a charm quark and an up antiquark, and its anti- partner has a charm antiquark and an up quark. The various kinds of antimatter are almost all named using the anti- prefix, like quark versus antiquark. These particles can cancel out normal matter-which is kind of a problem if you want the universe to, well, exist. What Is Antimatter?Īntiquarks are the opposite of quarks and are considered a type of antimatter. Physicists have known that for over a decade, but the new research shows for the first time that charm mesons can actually oscillate back and forth between the two states. That's because, along with leptons, quarks make up all known matter.Ĭharm mesons can travel as a mixture of both its particle and antiparticle states (a phenomenon appropriately called "mixing"). So, they're uncommon in nature itself, but physicists are interested in studying them in artificial environments (like in the LHC) because they want to better understand quarks. Quarks and antiquarks vary because they have different properties-like electrical charge of equal magnitude, but opposite sign.īack to mesons: They're almost the size of neutrons or protons, but are extremely unstable. Each also has an antiparticle, called an antiquark. There are six "flavors" of quark: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom. Via Symmetry Magazine: a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication. In case you skipped that lecture in quantum physics, quarks are particles that combine together to form "hadrons," some of which are protons and neutrons-the basic components of atomic nuclei. These are extremely short-lived subatomic particles with a balanced number of quarks and antiquarks. To understand what's going on here, we first have to unpack the meson particle. While the findings are basically the definition of minuscule, the ramifications are anything but the physicists say the charm meson particle's ability to exist as both itself and its alter-ego could shake up our assumptions about the very nature of reality. They've recently submitted the work for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters. But the difference between the two is infinitesimally small-0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001 grams to be exact, according to the scientists' research, described in a new paper published last month on the arXiv preprint server (that means the work hasn't been peer-reviewed yet). This state is known as "quantum superposition," and it's at the heart of the famous Schrödinger's Cat thought experiment.Īs a result of this situation, the charm meson exists as two distinct particles with two distinct masses. A charm meson particle, after all, can exist in a state where it is both itself and its evil twin (the antiparticle version) at once. Yes, this breakthrough in quantum physics is as heady as it sounds. Oxford researchers, using data from the second run of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC)-a particle accelerator at the Switzerland-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (known internationally as CERN)-made the determination by taking extremely precise measurements of the masses of two particles: the charm meson in both its particle and antiparticle states. To measure the tiny interaction, scientists had to scale down their experiment to the extraordinarily tiny size of 1 x 10^-38 grams.Ī quirky type of subatomic particle known as the charm meson has the seemingly magical ability to switch states between matter and antimatter (and back again), according to the team of over 1,000 physicists who were involved in documenting the phenomenon for the first time.This oscillation proves that charm meson particles can alternate between states of matter and antimatter.Scientists have observed the extraordinarily tiny oscillations of a charm meson, a type of subatomic particle that contains both a quark and an antiquark.