Post by Max Planck Institute for Physics

💡 When the universe formed, a tiny excess of matter over antimatter emerged. One of the biggest unanswered questions in physics is why: Why did the early universe produce more matter than antimatter, leaving the matter that makes up everything we see today? Recently, the international Belle II Collaboration took a further step toward answering this question by collecting the world's largest dataset at the SuperKEKB accelerator in Japan. B mesons are a helpful tool as they are produced together with their antiparticles when electrons and positrons collide. By studying these events, scientists hope to gain new insights into the matter-antimatter asymmetry. The MPP group led by Hans-Guenther Moser contributed to this unique dataset by designing and building the detector that records these collision events. The team developed the world's thinnest operating silicon detector, with a sensitive layer just 75 µm thick — about the thickness of a human hair. #Antimatter #Universe #ParticlePhysics #FundamentalPhysics #BelleII #SuperKEKB Photo: Installation of the Pixel Vertex Detector in the Belle II experiment, July 2024 (Botho Paschen)