“Listening” to the oscillation frequencies of antiprotons and protons in the same trap makes it possible to compare their masses. A particle in such a trap oscillates at a characteristic frequency defined by its mass. So, they investigated both questions at the same time with one measurement.ĭo protons and antiprotons really have the same mass?įor their high-precision investigations, the team led by Stefan Ulmer, chief-scientist at RIKEN in Japan and spokesperson of the BASE collaboration, used a Penning trap, i.e., an electromagnetic container that can store and detect a single charged particle. In their new paper, the BASE scientists compare the charge-to-mass ratios of antiprotons and protons and – as the Earth orbits the Sun – the similarity of antimatter and matter clocks. Why only the matter remained, that makes up our solar system and the celestial bodies in the universe, is yet unclear.Īnother hot topic in modern physics is the question of whether matter and antimatter behave the same under gravity. We have reason to assume that in the Big Bang matter and antimatter were created in equal quantities.
In this sense, the existence of our universe is by no means self-evident. Another consequence of CPT: if a particle meets its antiparticle, they annihilate to pure energy, as confirmed in numerous laboratory experiments. As a consequence of CPT symmetry, pairs of matter and antimatter have the same masses, charges and magnetic moments, the latter two with opposite signs. Applied to the equations of the SM, the CPT transformation translates matter into antimatter. One of the cornerstones of the SM is the charge, parity, time (CPT) reversal invariance.
It is in some sense ironic that we seem to owe our existence to a broken symmetry in the best fundamental theory that exists, the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. Symmetry and beauty are closely related, not only in music, art and architecture, but also in the fundamental laws of physics that describe our universe.
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