Recently, an international team of physicists, which has Russian scientists come close to solving the mystery of the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. It turns out that the matter now dominates over antimatter, we must thank the neutrino. That behavior has led to the fact that the source of the particles formed many times greater than their antipodes.

One of the most intriguing mysteries of physics of the past (and current) century is the baryon asymmetry of the Universe. Let me remind you what that means: it is estimated that after the formation of the Universe of matter and antimatter in it had to be equal. Now, however, this is not observed - the substance is clearly more. Where then is gone much of the anti-matter and why is it so?

You can, of course be assumed that with time "extra" antimatter simply annihilated, faced with particles of matter, but it is unlikely that it was actually because of the large-scale annihilation of matter too would disappear with the release of the tremendous amounts of energy. Well, on the other antimatter could not divide - though it is the proud prefix "anti", but the effect of conservation laws apply to him, too.

And recently, scientists have little closer to unraveling the mystery. Actually, a little light on this mystery spill experiments that were conducted physics from Russia, USA, Czech Republic and China in the laboratory Daya Bay that in fifty kilometers to the North of Hong Kong. Although, frankly, the original goals and objectives of this group were somewhat different. The fact that scientists from the Institute of high energy physics, China Academy of Sciences, National laboratory Lawrence Berkeley and Brookhaven national laboratory (both - USA), as well as specialists of the Russian joint Institute for nuclear research in Dubna simply was engaged in the study of neutrino oscillations.

As we remember, this term means the process of transforming neutrinos or antineutrinos as "colleague" of another type (neutrinos come in three varieties - electron, muon and Tonnie). They differ in the following characteristic: the electron neutrino in the currency charged W-boson becomes the electron, the muon - muon, well, tonne respectively - in the Tau lepton. Now, a long time ago scientists have found that these three types of neutrinos can transform into each other. By the way, these transformations have long explained the observed phenomenon, namely, the lack of electron neutrinos in the flow of those coming to us from the Sun.

And now, in Daya Bay physics worked at the facility, consisting of the three neutrino detectors and six nuclear reactors, located at five hundred meters away. In fact, the reactors had produced neutrinos and antineutrinos, and they caught the detectors. This work lasted for several months, after which the researchers carefully analyzed the results. And they immediately drew attention to an interesting fact: it turns out, for all the experiments gone about six percent of electron antineutrinos generated by reactors. That is, until these detectors antiparticles just flew.

Of course, antineutrino couldn't disappear just like that - they just turned into a corresponding electron neutrinos in the oscillation process. However, the scale of this phenomenon was somewhat surprised scientists. Then they decided to calculate the so-called mixing angle theta 13, more precisely, its sinus. Let me remind you that the mixing angles are mathematical functions that describe the probability of transformation of one kind of neutrino and neutrino - antineutrino (there are three and they are denoted by the Greek letter "theta" - ?13, ?12 and ?23 ). Actually, the angle theta 13 answers for the oscillation antineutrino, so he was interested researchers.

And now, after all the calculations revealed that the value sin2 (2?13) is 0,092 ± 0,017. To us this number seems to be quite small, we can say very little, but for physicists it's vast, especially when you consider that such source was generally assumed to be zero. It's only one: the probability of transformation of electron antineutrinos in his antipode is extremely high. Simply put, this is the antiparticle and will be engaged first of all, once formed. But the probability of a reverse transition, on the contrary, very, very low.

Thus we can assume that the baryon asymmetry of the Universe was her "congenital" property. After all, the first particle, which was formed after the transformation the original quark-puhovoi plasma were neutrinos. It is not excluded that themselves first neutrinos and their antipodes were equally divided, however, due to the large value of the mixing angle theta-13 (and this is just the source specified for particles option) most antineutrino turned into its opposite. But the reverse oscillation because the same insidious theta 13 was very rare.

That is why in our world substance began to dominate over antimatter, because of collisions and interactions of neutrinos in the end and gave rise to all other particles. Well, since the neutrino is more than antineutrino, respectively, and other particles original dominated their antipodes. In the end, our universe was composed it from matter (although, if it consisted of antimatter, we would not have got really upset about it).

However, scientists believe that it is too early to say that the mystery of the asymmetry of the Universe solved. You need to spend some more experiments to verify the possibility of turning the other antineutrino in their antipodes. Only then it will be possible to say with confidence that one fundamental riddle of the universe was less...