Recordpub.com - Discovery may show early days of universe: 10 KSU professors among research team

STAR DETECTOR AT RHIC

By Matt Fredmonsky

Record-Courier staff writer

A leading international physicist Thursday called it a discovery that may have “unprecedented consequences for our view of the world.”

The find? The world’s newest, heaviest antimatter particle.

And it could provide insight into the earliest days of the universe.

Ten professors at Kent State University were among a team of international scientists who discovered the world’s largest antinucleus.

Their results, which elicited words of praise from Horst Stoecker, the vice president of the Helmholtz Association of German National Laboratories, were published online Thursday by the journal Science and Science Express.

KSU physics professor Declan Keane, one of the contributing researchers, said the discovery of the massive antinucleus will help physicists understand the evolution of the universe from its inception during the Big Bang to its current state.

“One of the major unsolved problems of physics is why the universe that we see today has almost no antimatter in it and is full of matter,” Keane said. “And yet we know in the Big Bang ... that matter and antimatter are produced in roughly equal proportions. And so something happened between the Big Bang, that was 13.7 billion years ago, and today that made all this antimatter disappear, and we were left with a universe that is primarily all matter.”

Keane said the new antinucleus doesn’t definitively solve that mystery.

“But it adds a piece to the puzzle and paves a way to this major unsolved question,” he said.

The new antinucleus is a negatively charged state of antimatter containing an antiproton, an antineutron and an anti-Lambda particle. It is also the first antinucleus to contain an anti-strange quark, which is an exotic antimatter particle.

The discovery took place at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collidor, a 2.4-mile circumference particle accelerator at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

The collidor fleetingly produces conditions that existed a few microseconds after the Big Bang, the theory scientists credit with explaining the birth of the universe in a massive explosion of particles. The conditions are created on a smaller scale by slamming together particles with an extremely high energy.

Scientists are calling the collision that yielded the new antinucleus the “little bang.”

Bryon Anderson, chair of the physics department at KSU, said the research and discovery opens the door to further understanding of the relationship between matter and antimatter.

“This discovery is significant because it plays a role in one of the fundamental puzzles of physics,” Anderson said in a statement released by the university.