Taiwanese physicists help reveal clues to missing antimatter

During the experiments conducted by the Belle collaboration, an international research project based at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Japan, scientists observed in B mesons a new source of charge-parity (CP) violation — a physical phenomenon assumed to eliminate antimatter.

The Belle’s results, published in the science journal Nature, turn a new leaf in “B-Factory” experiments, according to a KEK press release.

Particle physicists believe that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were produced after the Big Bang. However, only matter survived in the end, while antimatter was destroyed.

One hypothesis on the absence of antimatter is the violation of CP symmetry, a difference in the elementary properties of matter and antimatter. To date, CP violation evidence has been established only in the K and B meson systems, with larger effect in the latter.

To better understand the CP violation in B mesons, scientists devised the B-Factory — a particle accelerator — to produce large numbers of B mesons — one group of the elementary particles theorized in particle physics.

Currently, there are only two B-Factory projects in the world — the Belle at KEK, and the BaBar collaboration at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California.

The 20-strong Taiwanese team, comprised of professors and students from National Taiwan University (NTU) , joined the Belle collaboration under the title of the “NTU High Energy Physics Group” in 1994. The team has since produced some 50 research papers, according to a team member.

Chang Pao-ti, a team member and a professor at NTU’s Department of Physics, described the results as “preliminary, “ but emphasized that they might be able to establish a type of “new physics” that can explain the disappearance of antimatter should more evidence be collected in the future.

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