This CERN Antimatter Result Still Leaves One Massive Problem

After 60 years of looking, CERN finally caught the one thing that could explain why you exist. But one of the scientists who found it says it's not enough. Why? The day it came out, one article said it touched questions as fundamental as why are we here? The scientist who said it wasn't enough, Xue Tingyang, said the same day that it was a milestone. The first easy answer had always been that antimatter, the stuff that should have have wiped us out, is slightly different. So a team at CERN called BASE caught some in a trap and measured how magnetic it is, more precisely than anyone ever had. It was identical. Christian Smorra on the team said that's why the universe should not actually exist, and he said it about his own measurement. If matter and antimatter really are perfect twins, the Big Bang made just as much of one as the other, and they should have wiped each other out. So the team went down to a single particle of antimatter and set its spin rocking like a playground swing, under control for 50 seconds, which should one day make their measurement 10 times sharper. To get closer still, Stefan Ulmer said, we need to move out. This spring, they put antimatter on a truck. 92 particles of it went into a trap that weighs a ton, about as much as a small car. For about half an hour, it drove around CERN, never faster than 42 kilometers an hour. That's moped speed, with antimatter in the back. When the truck parked, the experiment just kept running, and Smorra called the trip a huge leap forward. The next one they're planning is to Dusseldorf, at least 8 hours away, with a generator on board just to keep the trap cold. The other easy way out was gravity, so the Alpha team at CERN decided to just drop some. About 100 atoms of antimatter at a time were let go, seven times over. It fell down, the same way a dropped key does. It knocked the ground from under an idea Gabriel Chardin had worked out. A universe where antimatter falls up. Berkeley put the chance that antimatter falls up at so small as to be meaningless. Joel Feigens worked on it. We're not going to be able to levitate using antimatter. Two easy answers, gone. The hard one is still standing. Matter and antimatter, identical when you measure them and when you drop them, still break apart differently, and that difference has been hunted for 60 years. It first showed up in 1964. James Cronin and Val Fitch were watching particles that should never break apart into just two pieces, and about two in every thousand did. Lincoln Wolfenstein remembered wondering whether it was just some annoying little effect, not a grand piece of physics. Cronin and Fitch got the Nobel Prize for it. Two years later, Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, put that effect on a list, the things it would take for anything to survive the Big Bang. He opened the paper with a little poem, a fur coat is sewed for the universe, shaped for its crooked figure. His whole argument began from one flat assumption, that there are no antimatter bodies in nature. But he wrote that he couldn't work out how big the leftover should be. Decades later the difference turned up again, in a heavier particle, and at first the signal was only encouraging, but not yet convincing. Until, by the end of that summer, two experiments, Babar and Belle, both had it. It brought two theorists a Nobel Prize. The committee wrote that this difference seems to be why our cosmos survived, then added one more line. The question of how this exactly happened still remains unanswered. In all that time, nobody had seen the difference in the kind of particle you're actually made of. Almost 10 years ago, LHCb, one of the giant detectors at CERN, thought it had. It went public with what it said was the first evidence, from about 6,000 particles. More data came in. It took LHCb more than three and a half years to look again with all of it, and the difference was gone. The first team to claim it was LHCb, and the team that took it back was LHCb2. For years after that, all anyone had was hints, and when LHCb showed another one at a seminar at CERN, nobody could call it real yet. Four months after that seminar, at a physics conference in La Tourbiellle, LHCb said it out loud. More than 80,000 particles this time, against 6,000 before, and the difference held. It wasn't a hint anymore. They called it an observation. For every 100 antimatter particles that broke apart, about 105 matter ones did. The difference had finally turned up in your kind of particle. Edward Witten, who had nothing to do with the experiment, called it an amazing measurement. And so far, it's the only place anyone has caught it. When LHCb went after it again, in another way the same particle breaks apart, it found signs of it once more, just short of the bar it had cleared before. So the difference is real. Then where did all the antimatter from the Big Bang go? Destroyed or still out there? The first antimatter anyone ever saw came down from the sky. In 1932, Carl Anderson photographed a particle that looked exactly like an electron, except it was charged the wrong way round. He and Millikan first took it for an ordinary electron going backwards. It wasn't. Four years later, Anderson had the Nobel Prize, at 31. Paul Dirac took it further in his Nobel lecture. Some stars, he said, might be made of it, and with the telescopes of his day, there there would be no way of distinguishing them. Today, a detector called AMS on the International Space Station may have caught some. It almost didn't survive. Three of its four cooling pumps had failed and astronauts went out on spacewalks to fix it, a job one astronaut compared to open heart surgery. Samuel Ting, a Nobel winner, runs it. His first count came to eight candidates for antihelium and he held them back. Asked about them, he said, we are not yet ready to publish any heavy antimatter results. If even one of those eight is real, some of the missing half was never missing at all. We'll keep following that, so subscribe. Simon Dubuchet and two colleagues went looking for the stars themselves through 10 years of data from the Fermi telescope and found 14 spots in the sky that glow the way antimatter would. If anti-stars formed alongside ordinary ones, there'd be about one in every 400,000 stars. Floyd Stecker at NASA pushed back. There should be no anti-stars in our galaxy. So either 14 spots in the sky are something nobody can name, or the missing half is still out there somewhere nobody can point to. Either way, nobody can settle it from the sky. And back on Earth, the machines that were supposed to find out why that one difference isn't enough are going quiet. Last winter, Britain pulled its money from the next upgrade of LHCb, an upgrade that would collect around 30 times more data than went into this result. Without it, the experiment that found the difference will likely stop in 2033. Tim Gershon now leads LHCb. He said it's like paying to heat your house but then sitting outside in the cold. On the same team, William Barter went further. He wrote that it's hard to see how Britain can be relied on again if it's the reason the upgrade falls apart. The next giant collider would cost about 15 billion Swiss francs. It still has no green light. In May, CERN's council met in Budapest and called it the preferred option, then set the real decision for 2028. Understanding why matter beat antimatter is on its list of goals. Germany has already said it can't pay its share, and Germany pays more than a fifth of CERN's budget. China's own rival machine is on hold, and the man in charge of it says they'd join Europe's if it's approved first. On the morning of the last day of August, CERN's antimatter factory, where the truck's antimatter came from, shut down, and it won't make more for well over a year. When CERN's machines do come back, the big collider will be, in CERN's own words, the last accelerator to wake up. Over a kilometer of the collider they already have is being taken apart. Its last collisions came in mid-June, and on a Saturday at the end of June, at six in the morning, its main screen, page one, said goodbye to collisions. Since then, crews have pulled out more than 1300 pieces, almost 900 meters of pipe, cut up with huge pliers. It won't run again for four years. It had just delivered almost twice what it was built to deliver. With every machine going quiet, all anyone has left is the one different CERN already caught. It fits what the old theory of physics already allowed for. Xue Tingyang said it was consistent with what that theory predicts, and Jessica Turner put it even flatter. The result, to me, is not surprising. The theory passed its test. And it's the same theory that, run back to the Big Bang, leaves almost nothing behind. Something left about one extra bit of matter for every billion bits of antimatter, once the rest had wiped each other out. That leftover is the Sun, the Earth, and you. Yang put the two numbers next to each other, the leftover the Big Bang needed and the leftover the theory can make, the size Sakharov couldn't work out. The second is a hundred million times too small, and that's what not enough meant. Not enough for you to be here. Without a difference between matter and antimatter, Chris Park said, the universe today would be made only of light. Only light. No stars, no earth, nobody to wonder about it. Something nobody has ever seen must have done the real work. Vincenzo Vagnoni, who spoke for LHCb when it found the difference, says there should be a new class of particles from the early universe. This July, CERN's CMS detector checked again, with an AI sorting through about 1.4 million particles. It agreed with the old theory once more. Sixty years of looking, and the leftover the old theory can't explain is sitting here, watching this.