Little West
Scientists at the University of Sussex measured the neutron property - a fundamental particle in the universe - more accurately than ever. These measurements will help scientists understand why all this amount of matter exists in the universe, and why was it not destroyed as the antimatter was destroyed after its formation after the Big Bang?
According to modern physical theories, the Big Bang, which occurred 13.8 billion years ago, must have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter share the mass but carry opposite electric charges.
An electron with a negative charge, for example, is offset by the antimatter positron, which has the same mass and has a positive charge. And if they met, they would disappear, leaving behind a light wave.
How did the material survive from annihilation?
But everything we see today in the universe, from the tiniest forms of life on Earth to the largest stellar bodies is entirely formed of matter, while scientists hardly find very small amounts of antimatter in the universe.
What happened early in the universe and disturbed the balance between matter and antimatter in favor of the former? This is one of the biggest challenges in physics today.
Within a few milliseconds after the Big Bang, the hot and dense universe was boiling over as pairs of particles and antiparticles formed and disappeared. In this "soup" in which matter and antimatter are formed and then annihilated together, it was assumed that the universe today contains nothing but the remaining energy.
However, some theories adopted today say that something happened in that early time, breaking the symmetry between matter and antimatter and making natural laws not apply in the same way to them, and enabled a small part of the material - about one particle of every billion particles - to remain in limitation Existence, which is what shaped the universe that we see today.
Compass neutron
These theories hold that one of the signs of symmetry fracture is that the neutrons (one of the constituent particles of the atomic nuclei and have no electrical charge) are somewhat asymmetric in shape and have two poles, like the compass, one with a small positive charge and the other with an equivalent negative charge.
In the past few decades, particle physics experiments have shown that the laws of nature do not apply equally to matter and antimatter, which supports the idea of "symmetry breaking" that explains the survival of matter and the disappearance of antimatter. But the proof of this idea remained elusive for scientists, because of the high accuracy and sophisticated equipment required to be made on the neutron.
In this new study, published on the twenty-eighth of last February in the journal Physical Review, a team of scientists from the United Kingdom and Switzerland examined whether the neutron was actually behaving "as an electrical compass" or not by measuring the distance between the poles and the electrode charge or what It is called "dipole moment".
The measurements lasted for two years, and the measurements were made on the so-called super-cold neutrons, which move at a relatively slow speed, using an advanced device designed by researchers at the University of Sussex and the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.
| A neutron torque meter (University of Sussex) |
Measurements topple theories
In this experiment, the researchers directed a bundle of more than ten thousand neutrons every five minutes to the device for measurements and examined it in detail every three hundred seconds. In total, they made measurements of fifty thousand beams of neutrons.
The team found that the neutron had a much smaller "moment" than what various theories had predicted about why matter remained in the universe.
Scientists say that these results indicate that the theories adopted today may not be correct and must be modified or researched on new theories to explain this puzzle. It may be necessary to review the standard model adopted today to characterize the elementary particles and the forces governing them.
But scientists acknowledge that the values of the distance between the two poles and the charge's electrode in the neutron or the so-called "dipole moment" are so small that they cannot be measured with the instruments used so far.
While this means that the theories that attempt to explain surplus matter are less likely, the puzzle remains unresolved at present.