2 ms·
Antimatter is old news. When CERN discovered the higgs boson a few years back, we did so by looking for the higgs decay products (the higgs is really unstable),
by dguest 10y ago
Antimatter is old news. When CERN discovered the higgs boson a few years back, we did so by looking for the higgs decay products (the higgs is really unstable), a significant fraction of which are antimatter.
For example: One of the most important higgs signals was the Higgs -> 2 Z boson -> 2 electron + 2 anti-electron decay chain. Or in particle physics jargon H -> ZZ, Z -> e+e-. The important thing is that e+ is an anti-particle, one of the few that was discovered early enough to get its own name (the "positron" was discovered in 1932 [1]).
Since the positron discovery we've discovered so many anti-particles that we stopped giving them special names. We just call them e+, mu+, tau+, p-, etc, to say nothing of the composite particles that are composed of both matter and antimatter.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron#Experimental_clues_and_discovery https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron#Experimental_clues_an...