Antimatter: the Universe's original dubstep

9 september 2013

Every fundamental matter particle has a corresponding antiparticle. Antiparticles and particles have a very destructive relationship, but in some very unusual particles they can exist hand-in-hand together, leading to very strange quantum-mechanical effects.

Recently the LHCb group submitted a paper where two different particles are observed to change from matter into antimatter and back again.

But they did something extra too: they caught the sound of the particles B0 and B0s while switching from matter to antimatter and back again, by translating the data into a sound people can hear.

Rob Lambert (LHCb group): "I was starting to wonder how I could explain this weird pure quantum-mechanical measurement to anybody else, but then I thought ‘This is a frequency, right? So, can we listen to it?’ I thought that was a really awesome idea, but I had no clue that it would sound so very, very, weird!"

So far this sound has been heard by at least 40,000 people from around the globe.