What happened to the antimatter?

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Bs mesons and their antiparticles are produced in pairs in high-energy proton-antiproton collisions. This computer representation shows the decay products of the short-lived candidate particle produced in a collision. The decay products are used to i ...
B_s mesons and their antiparticles are produced in pairs in high-energy proton-antiproton collisions. This computer representation shows the decay products of the short-lived candidate particle produced in a collision. The decay products are used to identify the B_s mesons produced in the collision. (Courtesy of DZero collaboration)

Scientists of the DZero collider detector collaboration at the Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have announced that their data on the properties of a subatomic particle, the B_s meson ("B sub s"), suggest that the particle oscillates between matter and antimatter in one of nature's fastest rapid-fire processes-more than 17 trillion times per second. Their findings may affect the current view of matter-antimatter asymmetry, and might also offer a first glimpse of the contributions of new physics, such as supersymmetry, to particle physics.


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