On June 13, 2023 a seminar was held at CERN to report some of the results and methods used by one of the major collaborations involved in the LHC. One of the motivations for this work is the fact that there is matter in the universe but very little antimatter. It is expected that whatever created the initial, very hot, universe would have produced as much matter as antimatter. These components would then have interacted and resulted in neither matter nor antimatter, just a lot of photons. We are an indication that this didn't happen.
Beginning in the 1960s and continuing into the 2000s experimental evidence showed that certain particle interactions violated matter/antimatter symmetry. This was incorporated into the Standard Model of Particle Physics back in the '60s. However the asymmetry involved wasn't enough to explain the amount of matter we see.
When the LHC was designed, many decades ago, it was produced with 4 interaction areas. One of these, LHCb, was specifically designed to determine how well the asymmetry predicted by the Standard Model matches experimental results. That shows how important this is to physics. The recent seminar presented the current status of that data analysis and it shows that the asymmetry is consistent with the predictions of the Standard Model.
So why am I writing this? I saw a post that linked to an article that was clearly related to this seminar. It also contained a significant amount of material clearly intended to provide background on the subject for readers that aren't familiar with the field. Why don't I say it was about the results from the seminar? Because what it reported implied the opposite of what actually happened.
Let's look at both articles. One says, correctly, "The weak force of the Standard Model of particle physics is known to induce a behavioural difference between matter and antimatter". The other says, incorrectly, the opposite, "The Standard Model of physics tells us that if we substitute a particle for its antiparticle, it should still operate within the laws of physics in the same way". There are numerous other examples of the second article getting things completely wrong. Most importantly in the way that the seminar's results are portrayed.
The first, the correct one, says "... the new LHCb results, which are more precise than any equivalent result from a single experiment, are in line with the values predicted by the Standard Model". The other says, the results do "... not fully answer why there is more matter than antimatter in the universe, [the experimental results] will help constrain models that do attempt to explain this strange asymmetry". Although it isn't explicit it inplies that the results show something new, the exact opposite of what is true.
How does this happen? The "journalist" could simply have copied, or slightly reworded, the article linked above. Instead they clearly expended lots of effort. Unfortunately, they had essentially no understanding of any of the physics involved.
I was made aware of this when a link to the incorrect article was posted by a friend. Reading it made it clear that the veracity of the information wasn't trustworthy. A quick search found the article at the top of this rant. I sent the link as a comment to my friend's post. The fact that people are far more likely to come across popular articles on things like this is not a surprise. The problem is that articles like this almost always get some, or in this case essentially everything, wrong.
