- 3046 - ANTIMATTER - and the Higgs Boson discoveries? Why is the universe is dominated by matter over antimatter, but there could be entire stars, and maybe even galaxies, in the universe made of antimatter. If the Universe did start out of ‘nothing” then there is equal amounts of matter and antimatter that would come back together and annihilate each other back to “nothing” again.
--------------- 3046 - ANTIMATTER - and the Higgs Boson discoveries?
- The anti-stars would continuously shed their antimatter components out into the universe, and could even be detectable as a small percentage of the high-energy particles hitting Earth.
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- Somehow the universe had an unbalanced birth? Antimatter is just like normal matter except every single particle has an anti-particle twin, with the exact same mass, exact same spin and exact same everything. The only thing different is the charge.
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- The anti-particle of the electron, called the positron, is exactly like the electron except that it has positive electric charge.
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- Our theories of fundamental physics point to a special kind of symmetry between matter and antimatter, they mirror each other almost perfectly. For every particle of matter in the universe, there ought to be a particle of antimatter.
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- But when we look around, we don't see any antimatter. Earth is made of normal matter, the solar system is made of normal matter, the dust between galaxies is made of normal matter; it looks like the whole universe is entirely composed of normal matter.
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- There are only two places where antimatter exists. One is inside our ultra-powerful particle colliders. When we turn colliders on and blow up some subatomic stuff, jets of both normal and antimatter pop out.
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- The other place is in cosmic rays. Cosmic rays aren't really rays but rather are streams of high-energy particles streaking in from across the cosmos and hitting our atmosphere. Those particles come from ultra-powerful processes in the universe, like supernovae and colliding stars, and so the same physics applies.
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- But why is antimatter so rare? If matter and antimatter are so perfectly balanced, what happened to all the anti-matter? The answer lies somewhere in the early universe. Where did all the antimatter go?
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- We're not exactly sure what did it, but something went off balance in the young universe. When the universe was less than a second old here, matter and antimatter were produced in equal amounts.
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- But then something happened; something caused more matter to be produced than antimatter. It wouldn't take much, just a one part per billion imbalance, but it would be enough for normal matter to come to dominate essentially the entire universe, eventually forming stars and galaxies and even you and me.
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- Whatever that process was it is totally possible that the early universe may have left large clumps of antimatter alone, floating here and there throughout the universe.
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- Those clumps, if they survived long enough, would grow up in relative isolation. When matter and antimatter collide, they annihilate each other in a flash of energy, and that would've caused some explosions in the early universe, but if the antimatter clumps made it through that trial, they would've been home free with no matter around.
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- Over the course of billions of years, those clumps of antimatter could have assembled together and grown larger. The only difference between antimatter and matter is their charge, all other operations of physics remain exactly the same.
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- You can form anti-hydrogen, anti-helium, and anti-all-the-other-elements. You can have anti-dust, anti-stars fueled by anti-fusion, anti-planets with anti-people drinking refreshing anti-glasses of anti-water, that all works.
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- Astronomers don't suspect that there are entire anti-galaxies floating around out there, because their interactions with normal matter, when two galaxies collide, would release enormous energy. But smaller clumps could be possible. Smaller clumps like globular clusters.
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- “Globular clusters” are small, dense clumps of fewer than a million stars orbiting larger galaxies. They are thought to be incredibly old, as they are not forming new stars in the present epoch, and are instead filled with small, red, aged populations.
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- They are also relatively free of gas and dust, the fuel you need to make new stars. They just sort of hang around, orbiting around their larger, more active cousins, remnants of a bygone and largely forgotten era. The Milky Way itself has a retinue of about 150 of them. And, some of them may be made of anti-stars.
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- Unless the globular cluster plunged right through the disk of the Milky Way, it wouldn't really blow up. Since the anti-cluster would just be made of stars, and stars don't take up a lot of volume, there aren't a lot of opportunities for big booms. Instead, the anti-stars in the anti-cluster would go about their normal lives, doing normal star-like things.
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- “Things” like emitting a constant stream of particles. Or having huge flare and coronal mass ejection events. Or colliding with each other. Or dying in fantastic supernova explosions.
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- All those processes would release tons of antiparticles, sending them flowing out of the anti-cluster and into the nearby volume of the universe, including the Milky Way. Including our solar system, where those antiparticles would appear as just another part of the cosmic ray bombardment.
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- Could some of the anti-particles hitting our atmosphere every single day have been launched by an anti-star millions of years ago? There are certainly anti-particles mixed in as a part of the total cosmic ray population, but because our galaxy's magnetic field alters the paths of charged particles, it's hard to tell exactly where a particular cosmic ray actually came from.
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- If astronomers are able to pinpoint a globular cluster as a particularly strong source of anti-particles, it would be like opening a time capsule, giving us a window into the physics that dominated the universe when it was only a second old.
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- We couldn't ever visit the anti-cluster, because as soon as we did we would blow up.
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- What is interesting about science and astronomy is that we re still discovering things. Another example is evidence of a rare ‘Higgs boson decay“, expanding our understanding of the strange quantum universe.
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- The Higgs boson is a subatomic particle predicted by the Standard Model of physics nearly 50 years prior. The Higgs boson doesn't live very long, quickly decaying into less massive particles like two photons of light.
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- The Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have found evidence for a rare Higgs boson decay in which the subatomic particle decays into one photon and two leptons, a type of elementary particle that can be charged or neutral.
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- Electrons and muons, a similar type of subatomic particle, are two examples of charged leptons. Evidence was found that the Higgs boson can decay into either a photon and a pair of electrons, or a photon and a pair of muons with opposite charge.
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- Using the Standard Model, scientists are able to predict the different elementary particles that the Higgs boson can decay into, with a fairly "common" decay being two photons. They can also estimate how often the Higgs boson decays into different combinations of particles, and it is particularly rare for the Higgs boson to decay into a photon and two leptons.
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- In this type of decay, after its short life, the Higgs boson quickly turns into one photon and what scientists call a "virtual photon." That "virtual photon," also known as an "off-shell photon" then immediately turns into something like, in this case, two leptons.
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- This "virtual photon," has a very small non-zero mass, while regular photons are completely massless.
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- The two leptons "hit our calorimeter really close to each other. The LHC's calorimeter is a tool that stops particles coming from a particle collision. Scientists can spot and study these particles when they're stopped or "absorbed" by the tool.
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- While scientists have predicted that this type of decay should exist with the Higgs boson, this new detection is "the first hint of evidence of this very rare decay mode.
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- By studying rare decays like this, researchers can explore the possibility of new physics that stretches beyond the Standard Model. The Standard Model explains a lot of things about our physical universe, but it doesn't include gravity or dark matter.
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- Dark matter, which emits no light and cannot be directly observed, is thought to make up about 80% of all matter in the known universe, but scientists do not yet know exactly what it is.
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- This does not give us new information yet about the Higgs portal into the 'dark matter. But when we can look for very rare things like this, quite handily it pushes the search forward.
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- Understanding the universe we live in is not easy. Stay tuned, you still have more to learn.
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February 13, 2021 ANTIMATTER - the Higgs Boson 3046
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