Antimatter Decay Rates Explain Existence Of Matter

Paintthemoon writes: "The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center released a paper Friday that may explain why matter won the battle with antimatter following the big bang. In studies of B mesons, they determined that there is a significant differential in decay rates between B mesons and anti-B mesons. Similar studies in the 60s of K mesons led to a Nobel Prize."

Comments

I am so not a scientist, but...

[Kris_J]

What this says to me is that there is something smaller than the B meson and that the "positive" version is (now) much more prevalent than the "anti" version, such that anti-B mesons get annihilated in the sub-sub-atomic version of a matter-antimatter reaction faster than the B meson.

That is to say that this is a symptom, not a cause.

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Re:I am so not a scientist, but...

[pubudu]

What this says to me is that there is something smaller than the B meson and that the "positive" version is (now) much more prevalent than the "anti" version, such that anti-B mesons get annihilated in the sub-sub-atomic version of a matter-antimatter reaction faster than the B meson.

The experiment deals with decay, not annihilation. The B meson is made up of smaller particles, viz. a bottom quark and some other anti-quark (up, down, or strange); the B- meson is made up of an anti-bottom quark and some other quark. The other quarks (u, u-, d, d-, s, s-) are more stable than the bottom quarks; therefore, the decay of B and B- mesons is most likely caused by the decay of b and b- quarks (into charm and c- quarks). Seeing that B- mesons decay more quickly than B mesons, we infer that the b- quarks decay into c- quarks more quickly than b quarks decay into c quarks. That is, in this instance (as in the case of K mesons), the antimatter particle decays more rapidly than its matter counterpart. (We can't measure the decay rates of b and b- quarks directly because quarks are only observable in color-neutral particles, so we must observe these particles in their decay to determine the decay of these quarks.)

But as the experiment deals with decay, and not annihilation, the prevelance of one (matter/antimatter) over the other does not explain the results.

btw, here's a non-MSNBC article that deals with the issue. Here's a page that discusses the decay of b quarks in Bs (bottom-strange combination) mesons.