Strange particle discovered that changes between matter and antimatter

Scientists have now discovered that subatomic particles can switch quickly between matter and antimatter.

This breakthrough discovery was made by monitoring charm mesons, which are subatomic particles that contain quarks (elementary particles and fundamental blocks of matter) and antiquarks.

Each particle has an antiparticle that has the same mass, lifetime, and spin, but opposite physical charges – including electric charge. The mass of quarks forms composite particles known as hadrons, the most stable of which are the protons and neutrons found in atoms.

In quantum physics, enchanted mesons can be both a particle and an antiparticle at the same time, just as light can behave as both a wave and a particle. This state is called quantum superposition and results in lighter particles and heavier particles. While scientists knew that these subatomic particles could travel as a mixture of their states, it has now been discovered that meson charms can oscillate between these light and heavy versions.

The difference in mass is very small – just 0.00000000000000000000000000000000001 grams (or 1×10-38g). This precision measurement is only possible with a few observations, such as in experiments with the Large Hadron Collider.

So far, the only particle that behaves like a charm meson, the strange beauty meson, discovered in 2006, is slow and therefore very difficult to measure in meson decay time,” said Professor Guy Wilkinson of the University of Oxford.

“These results suggest that the vibrations are so slow that most of the particles disintegrate before they can vibrate. However, we can confirm this as a discovery because [the Large Hadron Collider experiment] has collected so much data. ”

The collision of the two protons, which only traveled a few millimeters, allowed scientists to measure the determining variable that determines the speed of the transition from particle to antiparticle: the difference in mass.

Scientists are now interested in understanding the vibrational process itself and solving the mystery of why matter and antimatter are not symmetrical. The Big Bang was supposed to produce equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but it’s clear that this didn’t happen – for reasons not yet understood.

It could be that the transition is caused by an unknown particle that is not currently included in the Standard Model, the theory that describes the weak, strong, and electromagnetic forces.

In addition to gravity, it includes three of the four fundamental forces of the universe and must classify all known elementary particles.

learning, Observation of the mass difference between the neutral charms of the meson eigenstates, currently available in preprint and has been submitted to Physical Review Letters.

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