A major discovery at CERN may help explain one of the biggest cosmic puzzles: why anything exists at all

 

 

 

A major discovery at CERN may help explain one of the biggest cosmic puzzles: why anything exists at all. Using data from the Large Hadron Collider, scientists have observed a rare and long-sought phenomenon known as CP violation—but this time in baryons, the particles that make up most of the matter in the universe.

 

This is big because, according to current physics, the Big Bang should have created equal parts matter and antimatter. But when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate each other. So why is the universe made almost entirely of matter? Something must have tipped the balance.

Until now, CP violation—where the laws of physics treat matter and antimatter slightly differently—had only been seen in a different kind of particle called a meson. But the new study shows a significant asymmetry in Λb baryons and their antimatter twins, meaning they decay in different ways. This is the first time CP violation has been confirmed in baryons.

The result: a 5.2 sigma confidence level (a 1 in 10 million chance of being random), pushing us one step closer to uncovering the physics beyond the Standard Model. It’s not the final answer, but it opens a brand-new frontier in the quest to understand why we’re here at all.

 

RESEARCH PAPER

LHCb Collaboration, "Observation of charge–parity symmetry breaking in baryon decays.", Nature (2025)