par Hambye, Thomas 
Référence Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, 13, 2, page (193-203)
Publication Publié, 2012
Référence Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, 13, 2, page (193-203)
Publication Publié, 2012
Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | In our everyday environment one observes only matter. That's quite a fortunate situation! Any sizeable presence of antimatter on Earth, from the enormous energy it would release through annihilation with matter, would prevent us talking about it! For the physicist this fact, at first sight obvious, is nevertheless a kind of surprise: antimatter, which is observed in cosmic rays, in radioactive decays of nuclei, which has been copiously produced and extensively studied in accelerators and which is nowadays currently used in hospitals, turns out to have pretty much the same properties as matter. Moreover, the fact that matter dominates appears to be a general property of our Universe: no evidence of large quantities of antimatter has been observed at any distance from us. Why would matter have taken the advantage on antimatter? In this short review we explain how, through a limited number of basic elements, one can find answers to this question. Matter and antimatter have, in fact, not exactly the same properties: from laboratory experiments CP conservation is known not to be a fundamental law of nature. © 2011 Académie des sciences. |
