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Why cosmos has more matter than anti-matter?
A recent atom smasher experiment may help finally explain why our universe is mostly made of matter, and not its bizarro-universe sibling, antimatter. Antimatter is a strange kind of stuff with opposite properties from regular matter. When a particle, such as a proton, meets with its antimatter partner, the antiproton, the two annihilate each other in a powerful explosion. Scientists think the universe was made of roughly equal parts matter and antimatter just after it formed, but these would have quickly destroyed each other. The universe that remains is made of the small surplus of matter that was left over. But why would there have been a surplus of matter to begin with? To answer that question, scientists sent protons and antiprotons on a collision course in the Fermilab Tevatron particle accelerator in Batavia, Ill. When the particles smashed together, they created debris that included about 1 percent more matter than antimatter. This overabundance may hold clues to the general asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe. "We don't really understand the source of this matter asymmetry," said Don Lincoln, a physicist at Fermilab who worked on the experiment. "The stuff we've observed, we know is just hints. It's not the final story it doesn't explain everything."
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