Scientists have analyzed data gathered from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider to advance our understanding of why anything exists.
That existential statement is necessary because scientists think that the Big Bang produced equal quantities of matter and antimatter, and when the two meet both are annihilated.
This raises the thorny question of Why We Are Here, given that a universe comprised of equal quantities of matter and antimatter could produce a profound cosmic nothingness.
Back in March 2025, CERN published an article titled “A new piece in the matter–antimatter puzzle” that explained how results from the Large Hadron Collider beauty (LHCb) experiment shed light on “the subtle yet profound differences between matter and antimatter.”
Analysis of data from the LHC produced “overwhelming evidence that particles known as baryons, such as the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei, are subject to a mirror-like asymmetry in nature’s fundamental laws that causes matter and antimatter to behave differently.”
Scientists theorized that the asymmetry results from “the violation of ‘charge-parity’ (CP) symmetry”.
As CERN explained in March: “Particles are known to have identical mass and opposite charges with respect to their antimatter partners. However, when particles transform or decay into other particles, for example as occurs when an atomic nucleus undergoes radioactive decay, CP violation causes a crack in this mirror-like symmetry.”
When the symmetry cracks, “The effect can manifest itself in a difference between the rates at which particles and their antimatter counterparts decay into lighter particles.”
Scientists had observed CP violation in mesons, but not baryons. The LHC made it possible to make more of the latter – both matter and antimatter – and to observe them as they decayed, which gave scientists their first look at baryon matter–antimatter asymmetry and led to the conclusion that decaying baryons produce a little more matter than antimatter.
Scientists working on the LHCb experiment discussed those results in a pre-press paper that appeared in March.
On Wednesday, the journal Nature published the same paper, signifying a peer review process found the original work was sound.
So now we have a hint about why the universe contains more matter than antimatter – and therefore why you are here reading this story.
However the paper also notes that the matter–antimatter asymmetry it describes “is vastly smaller than what astronomical observations indicate, presenting an important challenge to the Standard Model and hinting at the presence of further sources of CP violation.”
Finding those sources, the authors wrote, “may open new avenues for the discovery of physics beyond the Standard Model.”
Which is perhaps even more of an existential matter than this paper. ®
