{"id":5050,"date":"2022-12-07T10:06:41","date_gmt":"2022-12-07T10:06:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk\/science-engineering\/?p=5050"},"modified":"2023-06-21T09:15:16","modified_gmt":"2023-06-21T08:15:16","slug":"evidence-of-the-big-bang-in-every-direction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mub.eps.manchester.ac.uk\/science-engineering\/2022\/12\/07\/evidence-of-the-big-bang-in-every-direction\/","title":{"rendered":"Evidence of the Big Bang in every direction"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you\u2019ve been following our mini series on the work our scientists are working on at CERN, you\u2019ll already have been introduced to Marco Gersabeck when he talked about<\/a> manufacturing, right here in Manchester, the precision equipment that is used on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there\u2019s more to Marco\u2019s story, and when we met up with him a few months ago, he first of all told us about the research his team is carrying out into matter and antimatter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201c\u2026on the physics analysis side, what drives our team is largely two things. It’s understanding matter\/anti-matter differences, so we work a lot with particles that are made of quarks – those are the most fundamental building blocks of matter, of atomic nuclei that are fundamentally built of quarks. And there are a specific set of particles that contain one quark and one anti-quark – so an anti-matter quark; they have anti-matter kind of built into them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Marco Gersabeck in his office at the University<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

“They don’t exist naturally – they have to be produced in some high energy collisions that can happen at a collider like the Large Hadron Collider or naturally in cosmic ray collisions. So when cosmic particles hit the atmosphere, collisions happen there as well and would produce particles like that. And then what we do is we study their behaviour and we compare the behaviour linked to matter interactions and to antimatter interactions. And we want to find and study in detail the differences because what’s driving this is the knowledge that the universe is made up of matter, and not of anti-matter. However, at the Big Bang, going back all the way to the beginning, the Big Bang produced matter and antimatter in equal amounts, and when they come together, they annihilate; however, there was a small amount, a relatively small amount of matter left over. And that is what constitutes today’s universe. And why that matter was left over and no anti-matter was left over – that is the main question that really drives us. And we want to understand a little bit more about that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s strange for non-scientists to hear things like \u201ca relatively small amount of matter was left over – and that’s the universe!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We said that it\u2019s strange for non-scientists to hear things like \u201ca relatively small amount of matter was left over – and that’s the universe(!)\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marco explained: \u201cIt’s really just a one in a billion asymmetry that the rest has indeed annihilated, as one would expect. And that has led to, again, an enormous amount of energy. And that exists as the cosmic microwave background; it was discovered many decades ago. And this radiation that one can see everywhere in the universe wherever one looks – that echo of the Big Bang if you want – that still exists, but there is this tiny amount that that makes up all the stellar matter of the galaxy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We mentioned that in Bill Bryson\u2019s popular science book \u201cA Short History of Nearly Everything\u201d, he\u2019d said that this cosmic radiation was responsible, in pre-digital TVs, for the static that you\u2019d get from an untuned channel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marco confirmed \u201cyou can pick up some of that. It was indeed discovered by engineers who were calibrating very sensitive antennae. And they picked up some what they thought to be static noise and they picked it up wherever they pointed the antennae, because indeed the radiation is<\/strong> simply everywhere. And yeah, if you’re looking at the right sort of wavelength you can see that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We asked Marco the question we\u2019d been asking all our interviewees : Does he get frustrated when you see the science you’re doing get reduced to tabloidy \u201cOh my God, they’re going to create a black hole and kill us all!\u201d nonsense. Does that frustrate him?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo be honest, I do tend to ignore by now the black hole question, because it’s been raised so many times when the Large Hadron Collider first started up, and we’re not doing anything fundamentally different now, and obviously we’re still here first and foremost. But even then, it was shown that there was a minute possibility that we could produce what’s called a microscopic black hole. But these things would evaporate straight away, so they’re not stable states. It would be fantastic if we were to produce those and see the sort of aftermath, the decay of such a black hole. That would be a fantastic discovery. We haven’t made it yet, but certainly the Large Hadron Collider can’t produce a stable black hole that would then eat up the rest of the world. It’s a very powerful machine but not that powerful!\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you want more from Marco, including more detail about his work, his views on future, larger colliders, and how his work crosses over into everyday life, you can listen to the full audio of our interview with him below:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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