Physics talk: The Big Bang ABC

Welcome to Physics 22 September 2020

This is a recording of a talk given over Zoom in summer 2020. We organised four of these webinars for students who had received offers to join us as physics undergraduates. They’re all delivered by our lecturers on areas of their research.

The Big Bang ABC: Antimatter, Bananas and Charm

Particle physicist Dr Marco Gersabeck says: “The lecture is about one of the biggest mysteries around the Big Bang: why are we living in a Universe of matter, which seems all but devoid of antimatter? The Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which subsequently annihilated to pure energy. Well, almost: a tiny asymmetry in the processes involving the very first subatomic particles led to a relatively small amount of leftover matter, just enough to make up all of the Universe as we know it today. I will discuss studies of these tiny asymmetries in particles containing quarks, some of matter’s fundamental building blocks. We have a theory that describes matter-antimatter asymmetries related to quarks and this has proven very successful so far.

In 2019, a dedicated experiment at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has discovered the last missing piece in the puzzle: matter-antimatter asymmetry in charm quarks. I will describe how we made this measurement and how it fits in the bigger picture. So where do bananas come in? The clue is antimatter, watch the video and find out!”

Speaker bio – Dr Marco Gersabeck

Dr Marco Gersabeck is a Reader in Particle Physics, specialising in antimatter research with fundamental particles. His research involves dedicated experiments both at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Switzerland and at Fermilab in the USA. He did his PhD at the University of Glasgow, after which he was a Research Fellow, first at CERN and then Manchester, where he now leads the team of over 20 researchers working on the LHCb experiment.