Have we discovered a clue about matter's success over antimatter?

A slight difference in decay might be significant

Excerpt: "Understanding why matter and antimatter behave differently is key to understanding why there is a universe at all. Now physicists have discovered the latest example of a subtle difference between the stuff that makes up galaxies, stars, planets and us, and its evil-twin opposite.

Particles of antimatter, like anti-electrons and anti-protons, possess the same mass but opposite electric charge as the usual electrons and protons. In a discovery published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, an international collaboration of scientists working at the CERN particle physics laboratory outside Geneva described an imbalance among particles that are cousins to the protons and neutrons that make up everyday objects.

That makes the new observations “very important for us to further understand bigger questions like the matter-antimatter asymmetries in the universe,” said Xueting Yang, a graduate student at Peking University who led the analysis.

The Big Bang that created the universe should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. When a particle of matter bumps into its antimatter counterpart, the two particles annihilate. Thus, all of the matter should have annihilated all of the antimatter in a cataclysmic burst of radiation, leaving an empty universe for eternity.

And yet, 13.8 billion years later, you — made of matter, not antimatter — are reading this news on a device (or in a newspaper), which is also made of matter. Somehow, in the instant after the Big Bang, for each billion or so pairs of matter and antimatter, an extra particle of matter persisted.

This slight tipping of the laws of physics toward matter is known as charge-parity, or CP, violation.

The new findings are based on experiments performed between 2011 and 2018 at the CERN Large Hadron Collider, which slams protons together in head-on collisions. That is the same particle smasher that in 2012 confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, which imbues other fundamental particles with mass."