But, he added, “this is not the big discovery.” “If this is correct, then neutrinos are central to our existence,” said Michael Turner, a cosmologist now working for the Kavli Foundation and not part of the experiment. Those odds may sound good, but the standard in physics is 5-sigma, which would mean less than a one-in-a-million chance of being wrong. The Japan team estimated the statistical significance of their result as “3-sigma,” meaning that it had one chance in 1,000 of being a fluke. “These results could be the first indications of the origin of the matter-antimatter asymmetry in our universe,” they wrote. “But clearly this goes in the right direction,” he said. Nobody knows how much of a discrepancy is needed to solve the matter-antimatter problem.

“This is just one of the ingredients,” Dr. Not all the conditions have been met yet.

He pointed out that a discrepancy like this was only one of several conditions that Andrei Sakharov, the Russian physicist and dissident winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975, put forward in 1967 as a solution to the problem of the genesis of matter and its subsequent survival. Sánchez and others involved cautioned that it is too early to break out the champagne. “Already this is a real landmark.”īut Dr. “This is the first time we got an indication of the CP violation in neutrinos, never done before,” said Federico Sánchez, a physicist at the University of Geneva and a spokesman for the T2K collaboration, referring to the technical name for the discrepancy between neutrinos and antineutrinos. Although the data is not yet convincing enough to constitute solid proof, physicists and cosmologists are encouraged that the T2K researchers are on the right track. Ichikawa of Kyoto University, reported in Nature that they had measured a slight but telling difference between neutrinos and their opposites, antineutrinos. An international team of 500 physicists from 12 countries, known as the T2K Collaboration and led by Atsuko K.

Matter antimatter