Color Physics Updates

[Schneibster]

A great deal is going on at the Large Hadron Collider, much of it to do with color physics and the Higgs. There are occasional speculations that a Higgs announcement is imminent; meanwhile, the FTL neutrinos and the neutral D-meson asymmetry are the two most interesting. Here I'll follow the D-meson asymmetry research.

The asymmetry of the decay of the neutral D-meson results in a detectable difference in the behaviors of matter and antimatter, something that the Poincaré symmetries assumed to hold for spacetime, which are an assumption underlying relativity, imply to be impossible because of the implications of the Poincaré group for time, charge conjugation, and parity. To put this in perspective, the Poincaré symmetries are the symmetries that are obeyed if the results of an experiment are the same over here as over there, and tomorrow the same as today, and the same if you are going just short of the speed of light relative to Earth and if you are sitting on Earth. These are the basic symmetries of spacetime, implicit in the conservation laws of mass-energy and momentum and angular momentum, the most basic facts we know of.

However, it is clear that for the universe to exist as we see it, these symmetries cannot be exact; to be specific, for the universe to be majority matter as opposed to antimatter, they must be different in some detectable way. This may be enough of a "detectable way" to account for it; we're still looking but this one is much larger than the previously known neutral K-meson asymmetry, and may fully account for the matter-dominated universe.

Read all about it. Good shit.