New Behavior of Exotic Antimatter Particle Seen at Giant Atom Smasher

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Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior WriterDate: 28 March 2011 Time: 10:04 AM ET



A rare particle containing equal parts weird antimatter and normal matter has popped up in experiments at the world's largest particle accelerator.

Scientists recently observed new behavior of this particle, called a B meson, at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) atom smasher, a 17-mile long (27-km) underground ring at the CERN laboratory near Geneva. B mesons are made up of one quark (the building block of protons and neutrons) and one anti-quark, which is the antimatter partner to the quark.

All normal particles are thought to have antimatter partner particles with the same mass but opposite charge. When matter and antimatter meet, the two annihilate each other. Scientists think the universe started out with equal amounts of both, but most of the antimatter was destroyed by matter, and whatever surplus of matter remained is what makes up the universe we know today. The question of why the universe started out with more matter than antimatter has haunted physicists for years.

B mesons, which have both antimatter and matter packed inside them, were thought to have been common just after the Big Bang theorized to have created our universe, but are now thought not to occur in nature. Scientists can create them, and other exotic particles, only in energetic collisions in particle accelerators like LHC.

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http://www.livescience.com/13430-lhc-antimatter-particle-physics.html

[Auntie Bush]

1. Interesting!

[sofa king]

2. Can someone explain to me how this particle survives?

I would think that the q and the anti-q would annihilate one another before they could combine into a discernible particle. What's going on that allows it to be detected as a unique thing?

Uh, and I need that answer glossed with a mountain redneck translation also, please.

[atomic-fly]

3. ok

it like your crashin old Fords and Doges at the church Demolishun Dirby. you get a radiator hose to pop off on a front end crash
that fluid is red in the ford and green in the doge. but thars a far away so they can't mix up

[DetlefK]

4. Answer one of two: relativistic time dilation

Particles that fly close to lightspeed live longer because their time-frame is stretched. This has already been documented in other experiments (and the special theory of relativity also says so).

My second thought would be, that they don't fully overlap as wave-functions. Imagine each particle as a foggy cloud (representing their wave-function). As long as they overlap just a little bit, there is only a small chance that they actually touch each other.

The following argument works on positronium, but I'm not sure if it's valid for quarks: If both particles are circling around their shared center-of-mass, this could stabilize the system as a whole, because the zentrifugal-force would push them apart, while their chromodynamic attraction (another kind of charge the quarks are carrying) would pull them together.

[sofa king]

5. Thanks to both of you for those answers.

The quantum world is still a total mystery to me. Your explanation, DetlefK, reminds me that at least some of the basic principles of chemistry may apply at that level.