This week, Uno Dos of Trace was supported by skill share
and by you, for watching.
So thank you.
This story is so heavy.
It's massive.
Recently at the Center for European Nuclear Research
or CERN, a.k.a.
Physics Disneyland or actually wouldn't it
be more like Universal?
[CHUCKLE]
Anyway, they discovered that because of a charm quark
asymmetry, we can pretty much explain why our universe exists
the way it does.
So, that's nice, I guess.
Thanks for watching.
Make sure you subscribe, join my Patreon to support the show.
I'll see you next time in the future, or whatever.
I'm just kidding.
So what the heck did we just learn,
and what is a quark anyway?
Obviously I have questions.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hey there, Deep Space Fam, belly up to Quark's bar,
and let's learn about quarks.
You likely already know that our universe is made of matter.
Antimatter is also a thing.
Maybe you saw my secret mini doc about it.
I don't know.
Maybe you did.
At the moment of the big bang, the universe
contained equal parts matter and antimatter.
But immediately afterward all the overlapping matter
and antimatter annihilated each other in a huge energy
amazing orgy.
Most of the universe in that moment became energy.
Only one particle for every billion
survived the great annihilation, as I'm
going to call it from now on.
But why exactly wasn't there a 50-50 matter,
antimatter on the Big Bang?
What happened mathematically?
We should have had a perfect balance.
So what caused this imbalance?
All matter we know of is symmetrical.
Hydrogen and antihydrogen are exactly the same,
but with flipped charges.
An antimatter chair, allegedly, would be exactly the same
as a matter chair, except that it
couldn't exist in our universe.
There shouldn't be any imbalance at all,
and yet here we are with matter everywhere.
So physicists at CERN have been trying
to find out which tiny bit of matter
threw the whole system out of balance.
They answered this just recently using
the LHCb, one of the many experiments on the Large Hadron
Collider Particle Accelerator under the borders
of France and Switzerland.
Something is up with the charm quark.
Maybe it's not.
Hang on because this is where it gets a bit strange.
That's a little particle physics humor there.
The LHC and the experiments on it
essentially smash hydrogen ions together
to learn more about them.
It's like crashing millions of cars
together to figure out how they work on the inside,
and what you're really trying to figure out
is like how they put the CD player together.
The LHCb, one of the detectors on the ring--
well, actually, let me just read the abstract.
A search for charged-parity CP violation in D zero K minus K
plus and D zero pi minus pi plus decays
is reported using pp collision data corresponding
to an integrated luminosity of 6 minus 1
to the negative first corrected at the center
of mass energy of 13 TeV with the LHCb detector.
Oh my god.
Physics is hard.
So let me break it down like the LHCb did.
There are six types, or flavors, of quarks.
Up and down, top and bottom, charm and strange.
Each have different properties, and they
tend to pair up to make mesons or triple up to make baryons.
There are over 200 different combinations that we know of.
For example, a proton is two up and one down.
A neutron is two down and one up.
Electrons are something else.
They are not made of quarks, they're leptons.
It's a whole different thing.
Charm quarks are more massive, but they
don't seem to make up anything that doesn't decay
right away into something else.
So we can make and study them pretty easily
in charm factories.
And remember, all matter has antimatter, even quarks.
So, they made a bunch of what they called
these D zero and anti-D zeros.
D zero is a charm quark and an anti up quark.
Anti-D zero is an anti charm quark and a regular up quark.
Got it?
Great.
Normally these would decay into pylons or kaons,
but here's where they broke the rules.
About 1/10 of 1% of the time, these D zeros
favored one of the two camps, meaning
they broke CP symmetry or charge symmetry, and they broke that.
And that's a big deal.
I know it doesn't sound like it, but it's huge.
Why do you care?
You might not.
But it might explain part of why we have more matter and almost
no antimatter in our universe.
Why the Big Bang didn't just create a Big Universe of energy
because it had 50/50 of everything and nothing else.
They still don't know exactly why yet.
They're trying to figure out how to use the existing
laws of physics to explain what they saw in the experiment,
and they've seen the symmetry break
before with bottom and strange quarks.
But being able to see it in more particles, that's humongous.
So here comes some of my other questions.
Why are there six quarks but protons and neutrons
only seem to use ups and downs?
Well, a few physicists think there might not actually
be six quarks.
There might just be the two.
But because the universe has more than three dimensions,
when we look at these tiny little particles
in quantum mechanics, we're seeing reflections of them
in varying dimensions of space time.
So our dimension makes the matter with up and down,
with the strange in the bottom, and the charm in the top
are different geometrical figures of space and time.
They're in different dimensions.
So even though we see them with slightly different masses,
they might actually be the same or just
a different universe with a slightly different--
it's confusing and amazing and wonderful
in all the best ways that theoretical particle
physics can be.
In case you're curious, which I hope you are,
let's go one level deeper, shall we?
So quarks are never seen alone.
They're always grouped.
But something makes them do that.
What if it's because quarks are made of something else?
What is smaller than atoms?
Quarks.
What smaller than quarks?
A Swedish physicist theorizes that it would be preons.
Preons could make up quarks.
You'd need three preons to make all the different quarks we
know of, and there might be some preons left over from the Big
Bang out there that never got made into matter as we know it,
they theorize.
Those preon piles would be super dense, denser
than neutron stars, and hard to detect because they're not
really matters.
And this might help explain dark matter.
But while some physicists are on board with the preons,
some are preeved off and think it's rubbish.
This episode of Uno Dos of Trace was graciously
supported by Skillshare.
Skillshare is an online learning community
for creators with more than 25,000 classes in design,
business, technology, photography, marketing,
or film and video, which is of course my favorite.
Whether you want to fuel your curiosity or creativity
or just learn new skills to advance your career,
you can use Skillshare for that.
There's so much to think about, and I
learned a lot watching Debbie in the Art of the Story:
Creating Visual Narratives.
It was so good.
So go learn something on Skillshare.
Because you're here with me on Uno Dos of Trace,
you can actually get two months of Skillshare
for free, and after that it's still super affordable.
An annual subscription is only $10 a month.
The first 500 of the Nerd Fam to use the magic link
and join the more than 7 million creators learning
with Skillshare will get two months for free,
and you support Uno Dos of Trace.
It's a win-win.
So, now you know why some of your friends
who just follow the super intense and exciting world
of quantum particle physics were ridiculously excited
fairly recently.
Let me know if you have any new science that you
want me to talk about here on Uno Dos of Trace.
Obviously, I get excited about it.
Thank you so much for watching.
Come follow me on Instagram because I'm
about to head to Europe for almost a month
to do some Hello Science-ing.
Make sure you follow me so you get all the adventures,
and if you have any ideas of what to do in Greece or Vienna
or in Switzerland and France, if you know what I'm saying,
make sure you come and follow me and tell me all about it.
I am Trace.
Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the future.