Antihelium

Illustration of antihelium annihilation in the ALICE detector at CERN as well as in the universe. Credit: ORIGINS Cluster/S. KwaukaNew findings lay the foundation for the search for dark matter.How are galaxies born, and what holds them together? Astronomers assume that dark matter plays an essential role. However, as yet it has not been possible to prove directly that dark matter exists. A research team including Technical University of Munich (TUM) scientists has now measured for the first time the survival rate of…

A few years ago, physicist Ivan Vorobyev’s team at the Large Hadron Collider began producing an exotic form of antimatter known as antihelium. Antimatter is that elusive substance that annihilates upon meeting regular matter, and antihelium is the antimatter twin of the classic helium atom, the stuff you find in party balloons. While no human has ever conclusively found a naturally occurring antihelium particle on Earth, it could be key to answering one of the biggest outstanding mysteries in physics: the nature of dark…