It could all have been so different. When matter first formed in the universe, our current theories suggest that it should have been accompanied by an equal amount of antimatter – a conclusion we know must be wrong, because we wouldn’t be here if it were true. Now the latest results from a pair of experiments designed to study the behaviour of neutrinos – particles that barely interact with the rest of the universe – could mean we’re starting to understand why.
Neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, each come in three types, or flavours: electron, muon and tau. Several experiments have found that neutrinos can spontaneously switch between these flavours, a phenomenon called oscillating.
The T2K experiment in Japan watches for these oscillations as neutrinos travel between the J-PARC accelerator in Tokai and the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector in Kamioka, 295 kilometres away. It began operating in February 2010, but had to shut down for several years after Japan was rocked by a magnitude-9 earthquake in 2011.
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