US physicists have shed light on a long-standing mystery after they captured rare experimental evidence that links the fleeting virtual “nothingness” of the quantum world to the formation of real, detectable matter.
The discovery was made by the STAR Collaboration at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory’s (BNL) Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC). RHIC is the world’s first heavy-ion collider.
These short-lived particles are particularly useful to scientists, as the orientation of their quantum spin, a crucial property related to magnetism, can be reconstructed from how they decay. The team now realized that when lambdas and antilambdas are produced close together in a collision, their spins are perfectly aligned.
“This work gives us a unique window into the quantum vacuum that may open a new era in our understanding of how visible matter forms and how its fundamental properties emerge,” Zhoudunming (Kong) Tu, PhD, a STAR physicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory and co-leader of the study, stated.
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