LHC results may solve riddle of how universe can exist

Top boffins at the Large Hadron Collider – mightiest particle-punisher and largest machine of any kind ever assembled by humanity – say that they may have uncovered a vital clue explaining one of the greatest mysteries of physics: namely, how is it that matter itself can exist?

This is a mystery because the so-called Standard Model of physics calls for ordinary matter and antimatter to decay in very similar ways. Theory also says that equal amounts of antimatter and regular-type matter (such as that making up the Sun, the Earth, all the life upon it including us etc) should have been brought into existence by Big Bang. And yet here we are in a universe containing stupendo-vastnesses of common-or-garden matter and very little antimatter at all. Which is just as well, as if there were theoretically explicable quantities of the stuff about it would annihilate itself and us in cataclysmically powerful explosions of pure energy.

One of the things the Hadron Collider can do by means of blasting protons into one another head-on at just a gnat's chuff less than light speed is create all sorts of very rare and exotic particles – and the antimatter versions of themselves. Almost anything you might want in the way of crazy particles will appear in the shattered sub-subatomic wreckage spraying out of the proton pileups on the Collider's 27km underground orbital motorway.

The boffins of the LHCb detector instrument typically focus on so-called "beauty" quarks (that's what the little b stands for). Lately, however, they've decided that they like charm more than beauty, and have taken to probing the decay of D mesons made from a charm quark and an "up" antiquark as compared to the decay of their antimatter counterpart – which as any fule would kno is composed of a charm antiquark bound with an "up" quark.

It now appears that in fact the mesons and anti-mesons decayed in a noticeably different fashion from one another based upon results so far. This could still be a coincidence – one equivalent at this stage to flipping a coin and getting heads eight times running. But there's more data to plough through and the LHCb crew hope to demonstrate that in fact their charm-quark mesons are behaving in a fashion that Standard Model physics cannot account for – and which might help to account for the bizarre fact that we and the universe exist at all.

There's more here from the LHCb team (warning: non-physicists are advised to don a reinforced hat of some type to prevent head explosion before attempting to grasp this) or slightly more accesibly here. ®

This ssems readable:

Charming surprise

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The CP violation in charm quarks has always been thought to be extremely small. So, looking at particle decays involving matter and antimatter, the LHCb experiment has recently been surprised to observe that things might be different. Theorists are on the case.

The study of the physics of the charm quark was not in the initial plans of the LHCb experiment, whose letter “b” stands for “beauty quark”. However, already one year ago, the Collaboration decided to look into a wider spectrum of processes that involve charm quarks among other things.

The LHCb trigger allows a lot of these processes to be selected, and, among them, one has recently shown interesting features. Other experiments at b-factories have already performed the same measurement but this is the first time that it has been possible to achieve such high precision, thanks to the huge amount of data provided by the very high luminosity of the LHC. “We have observed the decay modes of the D⁰, a particle made up of a charm quark plus a u antiquark”, explains Pierluigi Campana, LHCb Spokesperson. “In particular, we have studied and combined the decay rates of the D⁰ and its antiparticle. According to the theory of the Standard Model, we should have measured a very small value of a parameter known as Delta A_CP that is calculated using these decay rates and is related to the properties of matter and antimatter. We found that Delta A_CP is around 0.8% instead of the predicted 1‰ (or less). Although making precise evaluations in processes involving charm quarks is difficult, the Delta A_CP parameter appears to be much higher than expected”.

And while theorists have already started looking into the unexpected result to check possible explanations or find completely new causes, the LHCb scientists are putting all their energy into pushing their analysis even further. “So far we have analysed only about 60% of the data available from the 2011 run”, says Pierluigi Campana. “We plan to complete the analysis but also to perform independent checks using different approaches and strategies”.

The LHCb Collaboration and the theorists held a joint meeting at CERN on 10 and 11 November to discuss the impact of LHCb results on the current theories and how we should now look at the properties of the charm quark. The improved measurement and the independent checks planned by the Collaboration will certainly contribute to clarifying the situation. The new results should be available by early next year.

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