A crack in the Standard Model?

Our current framework of particle theory cannot explain why all antimatter disappeared after the big bang while some matter survived the big annihilation battle. Today Scientific American highlighted results obtained with the Fermilab collider experiments that might open the door to finding a new force that creates a matter-antimatter imbalance beyond the Standard Model.

While it is far too early to call this a discovery, it is intriguing that both the CDF and the DZero experiments at Fermilab hint at this. In the story,

Luca Silvistreni, a member of the team that found the new results, is quoted saying, "Everything points in the same direction, and so I think it's rather unlikely this is a statistical fluke." CDF cospokesperson Jacobo Konigsberg (photo) points out that "if it is a fluke, that should become clear by the end of the summer as the Fermilab teams analyze more data."

The analysis itself was carried by a group of European physicists known as the UTfit Collaboration. New Scientist reported in more detail on their work a couple of weeks ago.

The quest to understand the matter-antimatter asymmetry is one of the nine big questions of the Quantum Universe report. Here is a 2-minute video in which physicist Persis Drell, now director of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, explains why we wouldn't exist if the early universe hadn't found a way to favor matter over antimatter.