Large Hadron Collider offers clues on why matter exists

The Large Hadron Collider may have found a clue to the mystery of why stuff exists.

Mainstream physics suggests that the Big Bang must have produced matter and antimatter in equal quantities.

However, it also suggests that the two are identical apart from having opposite electrical charges — so-called “CP symmetry” — and that if they ever meet, both are annihilated. So it is surprising that the universe contains lots of matter and almost no antimatter, instead of nothing at all.

Experiments at the LHC found tantalizing hints that antimatter behaves subtly differently from matter, a violation of CP symmetry which may help explain why galaxies — and everything else — exist at all.