http://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. (Phys.org) -- Recently analyzed data from the BaBar experiment may suggest possible flaws in the Standard Model of particle physics, the reigning description of how the universe works on subatomic scales. The data from BaBar, a high-energy physics experiment based at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, show that a particular type of particle decay called "B to D-star-tau-nu" happens more often than the Standard Model says it should. http://phys.org/news259236115.html Physics Mon, 18 Jun 2012 11:02:06 EST news259236115 The Reactor Experiment for Neutrino Oscillations (RENO) research team announced the first result of the search for the remaining, most elusive puzzle of the neutrino transformation. They have found disappearance of neutrinos emitted from six reactors at the Yonggwang nuclear power plant in Korea, on the way to their 1.4 km distant detector. The exciting result of solving the longstanding secret provides a complete picture of neutrino transformation among three kinds of neutrinos, and opens a bright window of understanding why there is much more matter than antimatter in the Universe today. http://phys.org/news253178341.html Physics Mon, 09 Apr 2012 08:19:18 EST news253178341 (PhysOrg.com) -- An international collaboration of scientists has reported a landmark calculation of the decay process of a kaon into two pions, using breakthrough techniques on some of the world's fastest supercomputers. This is the same subatomic particle decay explored in a 1964 Nobel Prize-winning experiment performed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), which revealed the first experimental evidence of charge-parity (CP) violation — a lack of symmetry between particles and their corresponding antiparticles that may hold the answer to the question "Why are we made of matter and not antimatter?" http://phys.org/news252237007.html Physics Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:50:28 EST news252237007 The Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, a multinational collaboration operating in the south of China, today reported the first results of its search for the last, most elusive piece of a long-standing puzzle: how is it that neutrinos can appear to vanish as they travel? The surprising answer opens a gateway to a new understanding of fundamental physics and may eventually solve the riddle of why there is far more ordinary matter than antimatter in the universe today. http://phys.org/news250359681.html Physics Thu, 08 Mar 2012 01:00:01 EST news250359681 The ALPHA collaboration at CERN in Geneva has scored another coup on the antimatter front by performing the first-ever spectroscopic measurements of the internal state of the antihydrogen atom. Their results are reported in a forthcoming issue of Nature and are now online. http://phys.org/news250347441.html Physics Wed, 07 Mar 2012 13:00:06 EST news250347441 (PhysOrg.com) -- The Standard Model of Physics suggests that shortly after the Big Bang there should have been the same amount of antimatter in existence as there was matter. As time passed, both should have decayed roughly equally, leaving roughly the same amounts of each today. But that is not the case of course as most everything today is matter and there is hardly any antimatter to be found. http://phys.org/news249808768.html Physics Thu, 01 Mar 2012 07:19:50 EST news249808768 (PhysOrg.com) -- When scientists discovered in 1998 that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, the possibility that dark energy could explain the observation was intriguing. But because there has been little progress in figuring out exactly what dark energy is, the idea has since become more of a problem than a solution for some scientists. One physicist, Massimo Villata of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Pino Torinese, Italy, describes dark energy as “embarrassing,” saying that the concept is an ad hoc element to standard cosmology and is devoid of any physical meaning. Villata is one of many scientists who are looking for new explanations of the Universe’s accelerating expansion that involve some form of repulsive gravity. In this case, the repulsive gravity could stem from antimatter hiding in voids. http://phys.org/news247231139.html Physics Tue, 31 Jan 2012 11:19:17 EST news247231139 Does antimatter behave differently in gravity than matter? Physicists at the University of California, Riverside have set out to determine the answer. Should they find it, it could explain why the universe seems to have no antimatter and why it is expanding at an ever increasing rate. http://phys.org/news246802923.html Physics Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:22:19 EST news246802923 Researchers have devised a proposal for the first conclusive experimental test of a phenomenon known as ‘Bell’s nonlocality.’ This test is designed to reveal correlations that are stronger than any classical correlations, and do so between high-energy particles that do not consist of ordinary matter and light. These results are relevant to the so-called ‘CP violation’ principle, which is used to explain the dominance of matter over antimatter. http://phys.org/news245934025.html Physics Mon, 16 Jan 2012 11:01:02 EST news245934025 Physicists of the Double Chooz experiment detected a short-range disappearance of electron antineutrinos. They presented this result on Wednesday 9 November 2011 at the LowNu conference in Seoul, Korea. It helps determine the so-far unknown third neutrino mixing angle which is a fundamental property with important consequences for particle and astro-particle physics. The Double Chooz experiment is looking for neutrinos produced in the nearby nuclear power plant. A measurement of this third angle would complete our picture of neutrino oscillations as reported by other experiments and will open new perspectives in understanding why we find matter and no antimatter in our today's Universe. http://phys.org/news240050747.html Physics Wed, 09 Nov 2011 08:45:55 EST news240050747 (PhysOrg.com) -- Why there is stuff in the universe—more properly, why there is an imbalance between matter and antimatter—is one of the long-standing mysteries of cosmology. A team of researchers working at the National Institute of Standards and Technology has just concluded a 10-year-long study of the fate of neutrons in an attempt to resolve the question, the most sensitive such measurement ever made. The universe, they concede, has managed to keep its secret for the time being, but they’ve succeeded in significantly narrowing the number of possible answers. http://phys.org/news240041679.html Physics Wed, 09 Nov 2011 06:20:01 EST news240041679 (PhysOrg.com) -- The SuperB factory, a particle-accelerator to be built in Rome and approved last May by the Italian government was officially launched this past Friday with construction set to begin sometime in the near future. The accelerator, which is expected to take six years to build, will be constructed on the University of Rome Tor Vergata campus and will be named for the late Nicola Cabibbo, the Italian physicist best known for his work with weak force interactions. http://phys.org/news237636186.html Physics Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:03:22 EST news237636186 The kick-off meeting for ELENA, the Extra Low Energy Antiproton Ring, starts today at CERN. Approved by CERN Council in June this year, ELENA is scheduled to deliver its first antiprotons in 2016. This week’s kick-off meeting brings together scientists from Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the UK and the USA. The project is led by CERN. http://phys.org/news236497127.html Physics Thu, 29 Sep 2011 07:00:01 EST news236497127 By successfully confining atoms of antihydrogen for an unprecedented 1,000 seconds, an international team of researchers called the ALPHA Collaboration has taken a step towards resolving one of the grand challenges of modern physics: explaining why the Universe is made almost entirely of matter, when matter and antimatter are symmetric, with identical mass, spin and other properties. The achievement is remarkable because antimatter instantly disappears on contact with regular matter such that confining antimatter requires the use of exotic technology. http://phys.org/news235915345.html Physics Thu, 22 Sep 2011 13:40:15 EST news235915345 (PhysOrg.com) -- Results presented by CERN1's LHCb experiment at the biennial Lepton-Photon conference in Mumbai, India on Saturday 27 August are becoming the most precise yet on particles called B mesons, which provide a way to investigate matter-antimatter asymmetry. http://phys.org/news233820793.html Physics Mon, 29 Aug 2011 07:14:23 EST news233820793 If you're bummed about humanity's biggest accelerator not producing a Higgs particle yet, maybe the latest effort to find a Z-prime will make you feel better. http://phys.org/news233468910.html Physics Thu, 25 Aug 2011 05:28:56 EST news233468910 International collaboration including MPQ scientists sets a new value for the antiproton mass relative to the electron with unprecedented precision. http://phys.org/news231048093.html Physics Thu, 28 Jul 2011 05:01:59 EST news231048093 (PhysOrg.com) -- Suppose at some point the universe ceases to expand, and instead begins collapsing in on itself (as in the “Big Crunch” scenario), and eventually becomes a supermassive black hole. The black hole’s extreme mass produces an extremely strong gravitational field. Through a gravitational version of the so-called Schwinger mechanism, this gravitational field converts virtual particle-antiparticle pairs from the surrounding quantum vacuum into real particle-antiparticle pairs. If the black hole is made from matter (antimatter), it could violently repel billions and billions of antiparticles (particles) out into space in a fraction of a second, creating an ejection event that would look quite similar to a Big Bang. http://phys.org/news230289246.html Physics Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:14:23 EST news230289246 (PhysOrg.com) -- Physicists at the University of California, Riverside report that they have discovered a new way to create positronium, an exotic and short-lived atom that could help answer what happened to antimatter in the universe, why nature favored matter over antimatter at the universe's creation. http://phys.org/news229623470.html Physics Mon, 11 Jul 2011 17:18:05 EST news229623470 Scientists of the MINOS experiment at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory announced today (June 24) the results from a search for a rare phenomenon, the transformation of muon neutrinos into electron neutrinos. The result is consistent with and significantly constrains a measurement reported 10 days ago by the Japanese T2K experiment, which announced an indication of this type of transformation. http://phys.org/news228155249.html Physics Fri, 24 Jun 2011 17:28:55 EST news228155249 Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU, Germany) have built what is currently the strongest source of ultracold neutrons. Ultracold neutrons (UCNs) were first generated here five years ago. They are much slower than thermal neutrons and are characterized by the fact that they can be stored in special containers. This property makes them important tools for experiments to investigate why matter dominates over antimatter in our universe and how the lightest elements were created directly after the Big Bang. "We have commissioned a new UCN source and improved the overall procedure so that we can now generate and store considerably more ultracold neutrons than before and more than anybody else," says Professor Werner Heil of the Institute of Physics at Mainz University. Having so far managed to achieve a density of ten UCN per cubic centimeter, the Mainz research team of chemists and physicists has become one of the global leaders in this research field. http://phys.org/news226838206.html Physics Thu, 09 Jun 2011 11:40:15 EST news226838206 Trapping antihydrogen atoms at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) has become so routine that physicists are confident that they can soon begin experiments on this rare antimatter equivalent of the hydrogen atom, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. http://phys.org/news226496652.html Physics Sun, 05 Jun 2011 13:00:18 EST news226496652 (PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists at Imperial College London have made the most accurate measurement yet of the shape of the humble electron, finding that it is almost a perfect sphere, in a study published in the journal Nature today. http://phys.org/news225546622.html Physics Wed, 25 May 2011 13:00:11 EST news225546622 A new movie from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows a sequence of Chandra images of the Crab Nebula, taken over an interval of seven months. Dramatic variations are seen, including the expansion of a ring of X-ray emission around the pulsar (white dot near center) and changes in the knots within this ring. http://phys.org/news224755796.html Space & Earth Mon, 16 May 2011 09:10:21 EST news224755796 (PhysOrg.com) -- Seventeen minutes may not seem like much, but to physicists working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) project at the CERN physics complex near Geneva, 1000 seconds is nearly four orders of magnitude better than has ever been achieved before in capturing and holding onto antimatter atoms. In a paper published in arXiv, a team of researchers studying the properties of antimatter, describe a process whereby they were able to confine antihydrogen atoms for just that long, paving the way for new experiments that could demonstrate properties of antimatter that until now, have been largely speculation. http://phys.org/news223739871.html Physics Wed, 04 May 2011 14:58:30 EST news223739871 Physicists at Rice University and their collaborators have detected the antimatter partner of the helium nucleus, antihelium-4. This newly observed particle is the heaviest antimatter particle ever detected. http://phys.org/news222945267.html Physics Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:14:46 EST news222945267 (PhysOrg.com) -- Members of the international STAR collaboration at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider -- a particle accelerator used to recreate and study conditions of the early universe at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory -- have detected the antimatter partner of the helium nucleus: antihelium-4. This new particle, also known as the anti-alpha, is the heaviest antinucleus ever detected, topping a discovery announced by the same collaboration just last year. http://phys.org/news222871096.html Physics Sun, 24 Apr 2011 16:52:55 EST news222871096 Since the late 20th century, astronomers have been aware of data that suggest the universe is not only expanding, but expanding at an accelerating rate. According to the currently accepted model, this accelerated expansion is due to dark energy, a mysterious repulsive force that makes up about 73% of the energy density of the universe. Now, a new study reveals an alternative theory: that the expansion of the universe is actually due to the relationship between matter and antimatter. According to this study, matter and antimatter gravitationally repel each other and create a kind of “antigravity” that could do away with the need for dark energy in the universe. http://phys.org/news222341702.html Physics Mon, 18 Apr 2011 10:35:34 EST news222341702 (PhysOrg.com) -- In 1998, scientists discovered that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. Currently, the most widely accepted explanation for this observation is the presence of an unidentified dark energy, although several other possibilities have been proposed. One of these alternatives is that some kind of repulsive gravity – or antigravity – is pushing the Universe apart. As a new study shows, general relativity predicts that the gravitational interaction between matter and antimatter is mutually repulsive, and could potentially explain the observed expansion of the Universe without the need for dark energy. http://phys.org/news221886622.html Physics Wed, 13 Apr 2011 06:40:01 EST news221886622 Using data from experiments performed in 2010 at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's largest particle accelerator near Geneva, Switzerland, scientists are studying rare particle decays that could explain why the universe has more matter than antimatter. http://phys.org/news220625632.html Physics Tue, 29 Mar 2011 13:55:21 EST news220625632