Epic Breakthrough: "Insight into How Matter Formed in the Universe"
An international collaboration of scientists has reported in landmark detail the decay process of a subatomic particle called a kaon – information that may help answer fundamental questions about how the universe began. The research used breakthrough techniques on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers to expand on a 1964 Nobel Prize-winning experiment. A new generation of IBM supercomputers now being installed will allow scientists to calculate the decay in even greater detail.
“This calculation brings us closer to answering fundamental questions about how matter formed in the early universe and why we, and everything else we observe today, are made of matter and not anti-matter,” says Thomas Blum, associate professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, a co-author of the paper.
When the universe began, did it start out with more particles of matter than anti-matter? That is the way the question was framed by another co-author, Taku Izubuchi of the RIKEN BNL Research Center and Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, NY. Or, he asked, were the two symmetrical and was there another mechanism that resulted in more matter than anti-matter?
This diagram, provided by Brookhaven National Laboratory, illustrates the wide range of distance scales that must be understood before the kaon decay calculation can be performed. The lowest level is a picture showing the tracks of decay particles. The layer above that provides a "key," showing how the kaon (K) "breaks apart" into two pions. The next layer represents the numerical calculation, and the top layer shows the decay mathematically in what is known as a Feynman diagram.
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