So some big news from Fermilab was just recently released. (
See press release here). The interesting thing here is that the result gives an indication of why we observe an abundance of matter over anti-matter in the universe. In one interpretation (and this might be a bit of an over-reach) this could be experimental evidence for physics that isn't explained in our current best theory of particle physics (The Standard Model) and help explain the existence of everything we observe in the universe!
With such big claims I think this result deserves a little bit more of an explanation. So one of the big mysteries in particle physics is why do we observe so much matter in the universe (basically everything we can see with our telescopes) and observe so little anti-matter IF the universe started with the Big Bang in which the universe was created with a sea of matter and anti-matter and was governed by the laws of particle physics in the early universe.
Basically, up till these very new results (with the exception of the B_s results discovered at Fermilab) there was no experimental evidence that matter and anti-matter behaved differently in any way significant enough to account for the HUGE difference in the abundance of matter over anti-matter that we see in the universe. However, this new result is a big clue along that path showing a very significant difference between the symmetric theory known as the Standard Model and what we observe experimentally.
Now the D0 experiment had to use some really sophisticated techniques to do this experiment and using aspects of their experiment that CDF (its sister experiment at the Tevatron and my home) is not capable of doing.
So what does this mean...could mean a lot of different things. But I'm a big fan of making a measurement and letting it speak for itself. So here is what we can say, this is the first statistically significant evidence that the Standard Model gets the CP violation wrong, Fermilab/D0 were the first to get there, and there is evidence that our Standard Model isn't the whole story and we need to keep looking because the new physics we have been searching for to explain the universe is right around the corner!
