Antihyper Hydrogen-4:
The newly found antiparticle, called antihyper hydrogen-4, could have a potential imbalance with its matter counterpart that may help scientists understand how our universe came to be.
- Antihyper Hydrogen-4 is made up of an antiproton, two antineutrons and one antihyperon (a baryon that contains a strange quark).
- Physicists found traces of this antimatter among particle tracks from 6 billion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.
Key findings:
- Both hyperhydrogen-4 and its antimatter counterpart antihyper hydrogen-4 seem to wink out of existence very quickly.
- The physicists didn’t find a significant difference between their lifetimes.
- The scientists’ next step will be to compare the masses of the antiparticles and their particle opposites, which they hope could reveal some clues as to how our matter-heavy universe came to be.
- Antimatter: Except for having opposite electric charges, antimatter has the same properties as matter, same mass, same lifetime before decaying and same interactions.
