Speaker 1:

Hey everyone, this is one of those days when I can’t give a full new episode of Your Daily Equation. I’ll pick it up tomorrow with a live session, so please join me for that. But, for today, I thought I’d just quickly draw your attention to some interesting news that’s been bubbling up of late having to do with these strange little wispy particles called neutrinos. You perhaps read about some of the intriguing, not fully conclusive as yet, but some intriguing results coming out of Japan, which have found evidence for an asymmetry between neutrinos, and their antiparticle partners antineutrinos.

And why is this so important? Well, a big question that we’ve been struggling with for a very long time is this, since it’s the case that when matter and antimatter come together, they annihilate, they destroy each other, say, into a burst of energy, a burst of photons, let’s say, why is it that there’s any matter left over today given our understanding that in the early universe, near the beginning, there seems to be no distinction between matter and antimatter except, one has a positive charge, one has a negative of its charge, vice versa? So, they stand in that relationship. But the particles otherwise are treated, we think, by the fundamental equations in a symmetric manner, which means you would think that in the early universe, when particles were first being created, there’d be an equal amount of matter and antimatter, which means over time the matter and antimatter would find each other annihilate and there’d be nothing left over.

So the big question, it’s a version of course of Leibniz’s question, why is there something rather than nothing? But this is not sort of the philosophical version of that question. It’s the really brass tacks physics version of that question, if matter and antimatter were created in equal quantities, which seems quite reasonable based upon our understanding of the fundamental processes, and if when matter and antimatter come together they annihilate, why is there any matter left over at all?

And one of the potential solutions that people have kicked around, now, for decades is maybe there is a subtle difference between matter and antimatter, and maybe that subtle difference is what’s responsible for creating a tiny imbalance in the amount of matter versus the amount of antimatter. And maybe that tiny imbalance is the origin of the leftover matter that allows the universe, as we currently observe it, to exist.

In fact, you can do a calculation it’s kind of a fun calculation and maybe you can take this as your daily equation, your equation for today. What would that equation be? That equation would be the simple equation one billion and one minus one billion equals one, right? Kind of a silly sounding equation, but it has potentially deep physical significance in the following interpretation. So, the calculation should show that what you would need is for every one billion particles of antimatter you’d need one billion and one particles of matter, so that when they annihilated there’d be one particle of matter left over for each billion particles of matter, say, that you began with. That’s the size of the disparity, the size of the imbalance that you need between matter and antimatter, so that when they annihilate there’ll be enough left over, enough matter leftover to create stars, galaxies, planets, people, all that good stuff that constitutes the universe as we know it.

So, the question is, what could be the origin of that billion to one billion and one disparity, what could be driving it? And one possibility is to look at these particles called neutrinos. And the suggestion has been that, perhaps, the asymmetry is built into the way neutrinos versus their antineutrinos cousins, how they behave.

And so there has been a lot of work on this, but the one experiment in particular that has been recently in the news, this T to K experiment, Taakai to Kamiyoka experiment. It’s an experiment in Japan where neutrinos are fired through a large span of bedrock. I mean, neutrinos can go through like trillions of miles of lead with only a small possibility of interacting with the particles of that lead. They just sort of pass right through these wispy ghost light particles. So, you can fire these particles through long distances. And you can measure how they change along the journey.

And there’s some evidence that the way neutrinos and antineutrinos change along that journey, the way they so-called oscillate, there are various flavors of neutrinos, and flavors of antineutrinos. And it turns out that these particles can oscillate between one flavor, and another electron neutrinos, muon neutrinos, tau neutrinos. And the way they oscillate between these distinct flavors, there’s a little bit of evidence, maybe that’s not a good description, there’s some evidence now and that evidence is quite compelling that neutrinos and antineutrinos do not oscillate between their potential flavors in exactly the same way, at exactly the same rate.

And it could be that that slight disparity in the way neutrinos versus antineutrinos oscillate that, in principle, may give rise to the billion versus billion and one disparity in antimatter versus matter, which may itself be the reason why there’s any stuff, any material stuff left over in the universe. So, it’s an exciting development. We would not yet say that it has risen to the level of a true discovery, but the nature of the data is making this story quite compelling. And quite worthy of attention.

And I’d like to just leave off this little brief version of Your Daily Equation by drawing your attention to a program that we had not too long ago at the World Science Festival, I’m going to link it right down, there called The Matter of Antimatter, and it had some of the world’s great leaders in this journey to try to understand where the matter/antimatter asymmetry has come from. And, indeed, some of the folks who are focusing their attention on neutrinos were in this program. So, I think you’ll enjoy it. I moderated it, tried to keep the conversation moving along. There are some equations in this program. Some of you have asked to see the Dirac equation, you will see the Dirac equation in this program, if you check it out. So, do take a look at that program, I think you’ll enjoy it. And we’ll pick up our next version of Your Daily Equation with a live session on Friday, tomorrow, until then, take care.