Kaon Decay Process Holds Clues To Formation Of Matter

A 1964 Nobel Prize-winning study on the decay of a subatomic particle known as the kaon proved that there was a lack of symmetry between particles and their corresponding anti-particles. New research completed using the world's fastest supercomputers has detailed the process by which this happens, and may hold the key to figuring out what we are made of and how matter is created.

To achieve this accurate and groundbreaking model of a kaon's decay, the researchers had to employ some of the world's fastest supercomputers from IBM to build on the 1964 experiment. The resulting map of a kaon's decay, done over 54 million processor hours, will help scientists understand the process by which matter exists.

The universe as we know it today does not contain any antimatter. However, according to the Big Bang model, there were equal amounts of it present from the beginning. So where did all the antimatter go?

"When the universe began, did it start with more particles than antiparticles, or did it begin in a symmetrical way, with equal numbers of particles and antiparticles that, through CP violation or a similar mechanism, ended up with more matter than antimatter?" asks Taku Izubuchi of the RIKEN BNL Research Center and BNL, one of the researchers.

This question has baffled scientists and the 1964 experiment proved there was a violation of the charge-parity assumption. In fact, as the kaon decayed, it decayed asymmetrically between its matter and antimatter states, sometimes creating antimatter offshoots and new particles.

This new study achieves a level of accuracy - 1/1,000,000,000,000,000^th of a meter, or one femtometer - which is about the size of the nucleus of a hydrogen atom. This in turn allowed the scientists to make a detailed map of the process.

The findings have also prompted the next generation of supercomputers. The potential, and the need for greater computing power to further analyze these kinds of results is making IBM install the next generation of supercomputers at various research centers over the coming months.

The team of scientists included physicists from Brookhaven National Laboratory, Columbia University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Edinburgh, the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik, the RIKEN BNL Research Center (RBRC), the University of Southampton, and Washington University