Was the matter-antimatter symetry violated?

Danilo Nori
3 min readApr 17, 2020

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All visible matter in the universe is made of elementary particles, the particles known as fermions consist of two types:
Quarks: that make up protons and neutrons.
Leptons: the electron, the muon, the particle tau (τ) and the neutrino.
For each elementary particle there is an antiparticle, it has the same properties but with the difference that its charge is opposite, for a long time it was thought that antiparticles behaved in the same way as particles in a mirror world made up of antimatter, since 1960 we know that quarks and antiquarks break this mirror, particle-antiparticle symmetry, the violation of this symmetry was first observed in 1964, Sakharov proposed that CP violation is necessary to explain the observed imbalance of matter and the abundance of antimatter in the Universe [1].
This symmetry is also known as CP charge conjugation parity inversion symmetry, it combines the charge symmetry between particles and their antiparticles with parity. In 1967 Andrei Sakharov mentions, CP violation is one of the key ingredients necessary to explain why there is a particle imbalance for every 1.00x1010 photons, this imbalance is ultimately responsible for the existence of Earth, stars, and ourselves, if equal amounts of matter and antimatter existed in the early Universe they would have destroyed each other and annihilated in photons.
The amount of CP violation observed in quarks is not enough to cause it, so scientists have analyzed CP lepton violation in a mechanism called leptogenesis in introductory models to explain the observed neutrino masses, the hypothetical heavy pairs of neutrinos would have been abundantly present in the early Universe and subsequently decayed, in the presence of CP violation these decays could have generated the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry.
The discovery of a substantial lepton violation of CP would completely change what we know of the origin of matter, this observation together with the evidence that a quantity known as lepto number has been violated would provide solid evidence of leptogenesis as the origin of the matter-antimatter imbalance. .
These fundamental particles are reluctant to interact with ordinary matter, which makes their detection difficult, so far neutrinos are the least understood particle known, despite this they are omnipresent, neutrinos come in 3 flavors determined by their charged lepton, either an electron, muon, or a τ particle, neutrinos were long thought to be massless, however the dissolution of neutrino oscillators thanks to the Super-Kamiokande experiment in 1998 and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in 2002 showed that these particles have mass.
As neutrinos travel they change from one flavor to another due to the phenomenon of neutrino oscillation, a quantum-mechanical effect that arises because each neutrino flavor is effectively a mixture of a quantum superposition of three states that have different mass, it is necessary Note that the overlay state can change over time because the components work in a different way.

Neutrino oscillations have been analyzed in several experiments since their discovery, but in recent years small oscillations have been observed from mutated neutrinos to electronic neutrinos. The probability that this oscillation occurs in small but holds the key to the CP lepton violation, if the CP symmetry is preserved, the probability of oscillation for the neon-electron to muon conversion would be the same as the antineutrino-muon conversion. to electron.
Measurements thrill the scientific community but data and experimentation are still needed to be sure that a CP lepton violation has occurred, this requires a more accurate measurement, with more intense beams, larger detectors and greater understanding of experimental characteristics.

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Danilo Nori
Danilo Nori

Written by Danilo Nori

Ph.D. Experimental Physics | HEP | Geek

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