An international team of physicists has discovered a new fundamental difference between Matter and Antimatter. The team, working on the detector known as BaBar at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, has observed the intriguing effect known as direct Charge Parity (CP) violation in the disintegrations of heavy, short-lived subatomic particles called B Mesons.

The finding could give light on the formation of universer or Big Bang. According to Paul Harrison, from Queen Mary University of London, and Chair of the BaBar-UK Steering Committee,

“This result determines directly for the first time the magnitude of the fundamental matter/anti-matter difference (or asymmetry) in Nature,”

BaBar is a 1,200-tonne detector, built and operated by a team of more than 600 physicists and engineers from nine countries, including the USA,UK, China, Russia,France, Italy, Norway, Canada and Germany. The detector records subtle distinctions between decays of B mesons and those of their antimatter counterparts, called anti-B mesons. Both are more than five times as heavy as the more familiar proton and survive just over a trillionth of a second.
Each elementary particle has a special partner called its anti-particle that has the same mass but the opposite electric charge. It has the same mass but an opposite charge. The electron’s counterpart is called a positron. In the first seconds after the Big Bang, there was no matter as scientists says but Just energy. When the universe expanded and cooled subsequently particles of regular matter and antimatter were formed in almost equal amounts. When the matter and antimatter came into contact they annihilated, and only the residual amount of matter was left to form the universe what we are seeing today. Acoording to scientist Antimatter has tremendous energy potential and half a kilo of it is enough to power the United States for two days.

Via: pparc.ac.uk