Underground Experiment Asks Why We're Not Antimatter

[hue]

http://www.livescience.com/34810-underground-detector-antimatter-decay.html

A new experiment buried deep underground in a South Dakota mine aims to detect rare particle decays that could explain the mystery of antimatter.

Scientists don't know why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, but they hope to find differences in the way these two types of stuff behave that could explain the discrepancy. Antimatter particles have the same mass as their normal-matter counterparts, but opposite charge and spin.

The South Dakota effort, called the Majorana Demonstrator, aims to observe a theorized-but-never-seen process called neutrinoless double beta decay.

Unstable atomic nuclei (the cores of atoms containing protons and neutrons) will often let go of a neutron in a process known as beta decay. The neutron transforms into a proton by releasing an electron and a tiny particle called a neutrino. [5 Elusive Particles Beyond the Higgs]

[longship]

1. Example Beta decay equations.

The top diagram comes from a neutron in the nucleus changing into a proton by an down quark changing to a up quark.

The bottom diagram is the opposite: a proton changing to a neutron by an up quark changing to a down quark.

Weak nuclear force rules.

[dimbear]

2. If we were antimatter, we would call that matter. Vanity counts. n/t

[Xipe Totec]

3. Bingo! nt