New findings reveal the force of ordinary matter and antimatter behaves the same way, but this doesn’t explain why there is essentially no antimatter left in the universe. The conditions were made similar to those that filled the universe microseconds after the Big Bang-with temperatures 250,000 times hotter than the center of the sun in a speck the size of a single atomic nucleus. Any discrepancy could help scientists determine why matter, and not antimatter, dominates the universe.
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With the courtesy of Brookheaven experimental laboratory, the team led by Doctor Frank Geurts attempted to measure the strong nuclear force between protons and antiprotons. It is one of the biggest mysteries, Tang added. There is a tiny, *tiny* chance that you only get matter when you try to create matter and antimatter or one particle of matter for every billion annihilation event. However, when Paul Dirac, a British physicist, reconciled Einstein’s special theory of relativity and laws of quantum theory, he unexpectedly found his equations to stand true for matter’s counterpart as well and hence, antimatter escaped the realms of fiction and opened up many questions regarding the origin of universe. Tang and his group wanted to see if it could hold antiprotons together, as well. “Anything we learn about the nature of antimatter can potentially contribute to solving this puzzle”, researcher Aihong Tang said. But in that case, “the force between the antiprotons is a convolution of the interactions with all the other particles”, Tang said. Using a solenoid tracker (STAR, for short) more than 500 scientists worked on measuring the particle’s scattering length using a Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) within the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.
Another possibility is that there’s a few significant difference between matter and antimatter that’s caused the imbalance.
Besides being able to understand how much the particles deviated, scientists also observed their effective range, which showed them how close particles actually need to be to one another so that their charges could influence each other.
To do that, they searched the STAR data from gold-gold collisions for pairs of antiprotons that were close enough to interact as they emerged from the fireball of the original collision.
Zhengqiao Zhang, another scientist who studied the antiproton interactions using the RHIC, said: “We see lots of protons, the basic building blocks of conventional atoms, coming out, and we see nearly equal numbers of antiprotons”. In antimatter, the antiprotons are negatively charged, while the antielectrons (called positrons) are positively charged.
Tang concludes. “Our experiment confirmed that they indeed behaved just like ordinary matter”.
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The STAR collaboration has previous experience detecting and studying rare forms of antimatter-including anti-alpha particles, the largest antimatter nuclei ever created in a laboratory, each made of two antiprotons and two antineutrons.
