Pilar Hernández
Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Valencia
Is the study of good quality?
“Yes, it is a good quality study. It was carried out in the LHCb experiment, which is one of the four experiments at CERN's large-scale collider, and which is optimized for the study of flavor physics, that is, the processes in which one type of quark transforms into another. The greatest interest of these processes is that they may hold the key to why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter.”
Do these observations represent a milestone in particle physics?
“This is the first time that an asymmetry has been observed in the behavior of a type of baryon (made up, like the neutron, of three quarks, but replacing one d quark with a heavy b quark) and its corresponding antiparticle. The Standard Model predicts this phenomenon, which has previously been measured in many mesonic particles (made up of a quark and an antiquark), but, until now, not in baryons.”
What implications might this finding have (in this or other areas)?
“It is very interesting to study to what extent the Standard Model can quantitatively predict the observed asymmetry. This calculation is very complex because it involves strong interactions, and we currently do not know how to perform these calculations with sufficient precision. Contrasting the experimental result with theory is essential to establish whether or not there are effects beyond the Standard Model that could be contributing to this process. We know that the asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the Standard Model is not sufficient to explain the universe, so these effects are precisely what we are looking for.”