The universe’s dominance by ordinary matter is compelling evidence that matter and antimatter are not perfect reflections of each other. However, known differences do not explain the scale of this imbalance, leaving open the possibility that unknown physics is responsible. A new analysis of meson decays, conducted by the LHCb collaboration, has narrowed the scope of the search for such a scenario while paving the way for more precise measurements in the future.

Over the past decade, scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider have focused their efforts on searching for differences between particles of matter and antimatter produced in proton-proton collisions. The latest and exceptionally thorough analysis of data collected between 2016 and 2018 as part of the LHCb experiment was carried out by a team of physicists from the universities of Warwick, Manchester and Oxford in the U.K., TU Dortmund University in Germany, and the Institute of Nuclear Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IFJ PAN) in Cracow.