April 23, 2025
PRL highlights with Editor’s suggestion
Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider have revealed a previously unseen nucleus known as antihyperhelium-4.
Collisions of heavy ions at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, Switzerland, reproduce the extreme conditions that existed in the Universe just after the Big Bang. These conditions enable the creation of hypernuclei, nuclei containing protons, neutrons, and their heavier, shorter-lived cousins, hyperons, which consist of up, down, and strange quarks. Now, by studying these heavy-ion collisions, the ALICE Collaboration has discovered a hypernucleus called antihyperhelium-4 [1]. The team’s measurements of that hypernucleus and others could constrain models of particle physics and of neutron stars.
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References
- S. Acharya et al. (ALICE Collaboration), “First measurement of A = 4 hypernuclei and antihypernuclei at the LHC,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 134, 162301 (2025).
Link to the CERN News
The finding by ALICE represents the first evidence of the heaviest antimatter hypernucleus yet at the LHC
