Not that you probably knew they were looking for it, but a large group of physicists have created a brand new particle called an anti-hypertriton.

Here's why the physicists think it's a big deal:

Scientists have a poor understanding of the very, very early universe, before even the tiniest fraction of a second elapsed after the Big Bang. Some of the world's smartest physicists, people like Stephen Hawking, are trying to understand the nature of the very early universe.

However, after the first billionth-of-a-second or so in the universe's history, scientists believe they have pretty good theories to explain what happened. The rapidly expanding universe, they believe, was filled with something called a “quark-gluon plasma.”

This plasma was essentially a super-hot, super-dense liquid in which there were all sorts of exotic particles.

Matter and anti-matter

In the last decade or so, despite some people fearing the worst that they're trying to rip the cosmos apart, physicists have begun to successfully and safely re-create these plasmas in their labs.

By performing these experiments scientists are not only interested in understanding the early universe, they want to answer one of the biggest questions in modern physics: Why wasn't all matter, that is all the particles in the universe, blown to bits at the beginning?

The physicists ask the question because they believe the Big Bang created equal parts of matter and anti-matter. But everything we see in the universe today, from the sun to the moon to the stars, is made of particles like protons and neutrons, rather than anti-protons and anti-neutrons.

What happened to all the anti-matter?

Scientists like Carl Gagliardi at Texas A&M University believe the answers lie in the quark-gluon plasma, where there was plenty of matter and anti-matter during the first, fleeting few moments of the universe.

“Somewhere along the way the balance had to get tipped in the favor of matter,” he said. “Physicists would like to try and understand what caused that balance to tip.”

To do that they're studying anti-matter in places like Long Island, N.Y., where a particle collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory happens to be the most prodigious anti-matter factory in the world.

Gagliardi and hundreds of his scientific colleagues zip gold particles around a 2.5-mile ring and accelerate them to near the speed of light. Then they smash them together. In the resulting plasma, which reaches about 2 trillion degrees, or about 100,000 times hotter than the sun, they find gobs of anti-matter.

100 million tries

It's not easy to find the really exotic stuff they're looking for.

To find just over 100 anti-hypertritons scientists had to perform 100 million collisions and then, like detectives, look at the crash scene and determine what actually happened at the time of the collision.

That's because the exotic particles in the quark-gluon plasma rapidly “decay” into normal, mundane particles within about a millionth of a second, like what happened during the Big Bang when the plasma cooled and protons and neutrons could form.

Gagliardi and nine other Texas A&M physicists are among the many co-authors of a paper describing the anti-hypertriton find that's being published today by the journal Science Express.

So what is an anti-hypertriton? It's one of the most exotic forms of anti-matter ever discovered. And now that scientists have found them, they can began to compare anti-hypertritons to their normal matter counterpart – the hypertriton.

Is one larger than the other? Or maybe an anti-hypertriton decays faster than a hypertriton? Finding these answers may help scientists explain where all the anti-matter has gone, and why normal matter exists.

It will take some time, however. Gagliardi says they're at the beginning of identifying all of the exotic matter and anti-matter particles in the early universe's quark-gluon plasma.

If the plasma were an ocean, then, it's kind of like scientists have walked up to the beach and caught a few fish. That doesn't mean they have a census of the ocean.

Fortunately, as computers become more powerful scientists can detect and analyze many more collisions than ever before, and a new particle accelerator in Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider, also promises to deliver more powerful — and therefore more instructive — collisions than ever before later this year.

eric.berger@chron.com