 future experiment would need to find an antinucleus containing six antiparticles, and if this were produced by the same mechanism, it would be rarer by a factor of 2.6 million,” Keane said. “This huge factor puts that milestone out of reach of any accelerator-based experiment for the foreseeable future.”
Collisions at RHIC fleetingly produce conditions that existed a few microseconds after the Big Bang, which gave birth to the universe some 13.7 billion years ago. “Our understanding is that matter and antimatter were initially created with equal abundance immediately following the Big Bang,” Tang said. “The predominance of matter in the visible universe today remains a major unsolved scientific mystery.”
Several other members of the Kent State physics department are co-authors of the new paper by virtue of their vital contributions to constructing and operating the various interlocking subsystems of the STAR detector, including emeritus professor Bryon Anderson, postdoctoral researchers Jonathan Bouchet and Lokesh Kumar, Senior Research Fellow Wei-Ming Zhang, and graduate students Jeremy Alford, Jaiby Joseph, Yadav Pandit, Amilkar Quintero and Joe Vanfossen.
The STAR collaboration is composed of 54 institutions from 12 countries. Research at RHIC is funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science and by various governmental agencies of the countries of the collaborating institutions.
One of 10 national laboratories overseen and primarily funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Brookhaven National Laboratory conducts research in the physical, biomedical and environmental sciences, as well as in energy technologies and national security. Brookhaven Lab also builds and operates major scientific facilities available to university, industry and government researchers.
For more information about the Department of Physics at Kent State, visit www.kent.edu/cas/physics.
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For photos of Kent State physics professors Declan Keane and Spiros Margetis, contact Bob Burford at
email@example.com or 330-672-8516.