Matter and antimatter violently annihilate each other. If they’re absolutely symmetrical, then maybe — just maybe — the universe shouldn’t exist.
Researchers at CERN in Switzerland have made the most precise measurement ever of the magnetic moment of an antiproton. The magnetic moment determines how a particle reacts to an external magnetic force. They found that the two moments are absolutely identical but with an opposite sign. This is really problematic.
“All of our observations find a complete symmetry between matter and antimatter, which is why the universe should not actually exist,” says Christian Smorra, a physicist at CERN’s Baryon–Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment (BASE) collaboration. “An asymmetry must exist here somewhere but we simply do not understand where the difference is.”