“How come the universe is made of matter and not antimatter”

Antimatter is identical to normal matter but with opposite charge, spin and other quantum numbers. Mesons are a type of particle made up of a quark and an antiquark. Quarks are the particles that make up the protons and neutrons found in atomic nuclei, and come in six ‘flavours’ – known as ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘strange’, ‘charm’, ‘bottom’ and ‘top’.

The D-mesons in the CERN experiment are made up of one charm quark and one charm antiquark. The physicists have witnessed the D-mesons oscillating between being a normal particle and an antiparticle, a process that has previously been observed in K-mesons (composed of a strange quark and an up or down antiquark) and B-mesons (a bottom antiquark and any of an up, down, strange or charm quark). When this happens, the constituent quark becomes an antiquark and vice-versa, so for example the antimatter partner to the K-meson is made up of a strange antiquark and a ‘normal’ up or down quark.

But in some cases this flip-flopping happens at different rates depending on whether a meson is transforming into an antimeson or the reverse is happening. Experiments in the 1960s showed that K-mesons are more likely to change from their antiparticles to their normal particles than the other way round, and some observations at Fermilab up to 2010 have suggested that the same is true of B-mesons.