New Experiments Will Shed Light On Matter And Antimatter

If the laws of physics were precisely the same for matter and antimatter, you wouldn't be reading this. All matter, as we know it, would have been converted into light after the Big Bang. To explore the fundamental differences between matter and antimatter, physicists need a vast amount of data. In early July, the PEP-II accelerator at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, one of the world's chief suppliers of these data, reached a new milestone: It is delivering three times as many particle collisions per second as the machine was designed to produce.