Thursday, 8 March 2007 at 5pm
General Interest Seminar
From cosmology we learn that the Big Bang created matter and antimatter in equal amounts. However, we observe that the Universe is dominated by matter, there are about a billion protons for each anti-proton. This asymmetry is arguably one of the remaining puzzles of particle physics. For our Universe to exist there must be - amongst other conditions - an asymmetry in the rates of particles oscillating into anti-particles and vice versa. We will show how these oscillations have been studied with particles produced in accelerators (B-Mesons) and present recent measurements on particle-antiparticle asymmetries (CP-violation). We will discuss how these results fit within the accepted theories. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is one of the largest science projects ever built and will start its first run later this year. We will show how LHC will be able to shed light on more speculative theories of matter and antimatter particles.