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Particle physics

Song of the electroweak penguin

Nature volume 452, pages 293–294 (2008)Cite this article

An unexpected imbalance in how particles containing the heaviest quarks decay might reveal exotic influences — and perhaps help to explain why matter, rather than antimatter, dominates the Universe.

Elsewhere in this issue, the Belle collaboration, based at the electron–positron particle collider of the high-energy accelerator laboratory KEK in Japan, announces their measurement of an anomalous asymmetry in the decay rates of exotic particles known as B mesons (Lin et al., page 332)1. Combined with recent measurements of the same decays from the BaBar collaboration2,3, a similar experiment at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in California, the new finding provides a tantalizing glimpse of a possible new source for a very fundamental asymmetry: the dominance of matter over antimatter in our Universe.

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Figure 1: Weakly decaying.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Particle Physics and Astrophysics Division, Michael E. Peskin is in the Theoretical Physics Group, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA. mpeskin@slac.stanford.edu,

    Michael E. Peskin

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  1. Michael E. Peskin
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Peskin, M. Song of the electroweak penguin. Nature 452, 293–294 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/452293a

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