For decades, researchers have toyed with antimatter while searching for new laws of physics. These laws would come in the form of forces or other phenomena that would strongly favor matter over antimatter, or vice versa. Yet physicists have found nothing amiss, no conclusive sign that antimatter particles — which are just the oppositely charged twins of familiar particles — obey different rules.
That hasn’t changed. But while pursuing precision antimatter experiments, one team stumbled upon a puzzling finding. When bathed in liquid helium, hybrid atoms made from both matter and antimatter misbehave. Whereas buffeting from the stew would throw the properties of most atoms into disarray, hybrid helium atoms maintain an unlikely uniformity. The discovery was so unexpected that the research team spent years checking their work, redoing the experiment, and arguing about what might be going on. Finally convinced that their result is real, the group detailed their findings today in Nature.
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