A recent ground-breaking research has been published that can challenge the underlying principles of physics.
The research is on the decay of subatomic particles called kaons, which could change how scientists understand the formation of the universe.
University of Southampton’s Christopher Sachrajda has helped to devise the first calculation of how the behaviour of kaons differs when matter is swapped out for antimatter, known as direct “CP” symmetry violation.
Should the calculation not match experimental results, it would be conclusive evidence of new, unknown phenomena that lie outside of the Standard Model–physicists’ present understanding of the fundamental particles and the forces between them.
The current result does not yet indicate such a difference between experiment and theory, but scientists expect the precision of the calculation to improve dramatically now that they’ve proven they can tackle the task.
