The European Spallation Source (ESS) in Sweden is nearing completion and will use the world's most powerful linear proton accelerator to produce neutrons. This could lead to groundbreaking discoveries, including observing a neutron transforming into its anti-matter equivalent, an anti-neutron. This observation could shed light on one of the biggest mysteries in physics: why there is more matter than anti-matter in the universe.
The writer is a science commentator. For more than a decade, a remarkable facility has been taking shape in southern Sweden. The European Spallation Source, nearing completion in Lund and funded by 13 European countries including the UK, will use the world’s most powerful linear proton accelerator to produce the world’s most powerful source of neutrons.
That matters greatly to science: neutrons, the electrically neutral particles that sit alongside positively charged protons in the nucleus of an atom, can be used to probe the nature and structure of materials, just as X-rays once revealed the double-helix structure of DNA. There are several neutron facilities worldwide, including in the US, UK and Japan. But the superlative power of the ESS, which will undergo initial testing this year in preparation for experiments starting in 2026, might also provide a glimpse of something special: a neutron turning into its anti-matter equivalent, an anti-neutron. Spotting this could solve one of the biggest mysteries in fundamental physics: why is there more matter than anti-matter in the universe? “We should not exist,” Valentina Santoro, a particle physicist and senior scientist at the ESS, told me. The Big Bang, she explains, should have produced equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, that subsequently cancelled each other out. “So, maybe after the Big Bang, the majority of the universe was annihilated with just a little bit of matter left over.” The challenge lies in explaining the leftovers. One possibility is that matter can “oscillate” into anti-matter and vice versa, and that this process somehow led to the surplus we see today. Even a solitary observation of such a neutron conversion would be Nobel Prize territory. Neutrons, which scatter off nuclei like balls pinging around on a pool table, have long been used to peer into the heart of matter and material
Science Physics Antimatter Matter Neutrons
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