Why “beauty factories” could solve two massive cosmological mysteries

Did you know that, in physics, we have beauty factories? It has nothing to do with art or glamor. Instead, I’m talking about experiences where electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, are collitic together to produce particles called men.

These are made of quarks, the subatomic particles found in ordinary matter. But while such a material is almost exclusively composed of electrons, quarks and quarks below, a B Meson is made up of a beauty antiquarque and a quark up, below, in strange charm.

This makeup gives B the Mesons an extremely short existence, very far from daily life, so you may wonder why someone would bother to devote entire installations that we now call B factories to do them. The answer is that B Mesons can help us to solve a great mystery of the universe: why there is more material than antimatter.

We know that each type of particle has an antiparticle, but when we look at the universe, we mainly see particles, not antiparticles. The universe therefore appears full of electrons, but no positrons – identical to electrons, but with an opposite load.

The mesons are interesting because they exist between the material which is abundant in the universe and the antimatter, which is not. As such, we can be able to exploit them to find out more about the asymmetry between matter and antimatter. Understanding this would explain why there is something at all in the universe, because matter and antimatter tend to destroy in contact. We create B factories because they can help us explain why the universe is not empty.

Things become even more complex if we consider that the mesons also have their own antimatter counterparts. Each B Antomeon is made of a quark of beauty and an antiquark up, Down, or strange. In the case of men’s men made with strange or descent quarks (known as neutral because they do not have an electrical load), the particles oscillate between the mesons and the antimexons. In other words, neutral B mesons are spontaneously non -binary.

It is these neutral B mesons that are essential for understanding the asymmetry of matter. Although their non -binary nature is a prediction of the standard model of particle physics (which catalogs each particle ever seen), we can seek to see if the oscillations are exactly half and half. Are the particles that we first do in collisions more likely to be mesons or antimonies? If there was an asymmetry in these oscillations, it could explain the asymmetry of matter-antimatter.

In 2010, researchers from the Fermilab Dzero collaboration claimed to see a difference of 1%, but no other work confirmed this result. The possibility remains intriguing, especially since research does not imply the oscillations has definitively observed differences.

B factories can also help us understand something that we are some exist, but that we have never seen in the laboratory: dark matter. You may remember that this dark matter has been detected by observing its gravitational impact on visible material. We are quite sure that around 85% of the material in the universe is this invisible thing, but to be explained by the standard model.

Formulating a theory to explain dark matter means the hypothesis of a new particle – or particles. Some of them can interact with existing particles difficult to detect. The mechanism allowing these interactions is often known as a mediator. Since mediators are also difficult to detect, it seems desperate. But even if we will never see a mediator directly, given the good conditions, we can hope to see the particles in which they decompose – like the pairs of electrons -positron. This is where B factories can help: they are designed to isolate products from electrons-postron collisions (material and antimatter products are collision).

As a person outside the physics of the collisides, I find one of the most interesting things about this research is the way in which they maintain life experiences long after having stopped generating data. For example, the Babar experience at the National Slac Accelerator Laboratory, near Silicon Valley, was closed in 2008, but researchers are still passing the data and using it, in particular to educate the next generation of physicists.

In 2022, Brian Shuve at the Harvey Mudd College, near Los Angeles, and a undergraduate team tested a new idea against Babar data of almost 20 years. I have heard of this because, among other things, the idea proposes that a hypothetical particle called the axion would act as the mediator between visible matter and dark matter. Regular readers can remember that my main research is axes as a dark matter.

So, one of these scenarios (mine or shuve) capture how our universe works? We can simply discover it as part of the effort to understand the asymmetry of matter.