On August 22, according to the news from the Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, the research team led by Qiu Hao, a researcher at the Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and other institutions, participated in the RHIC-STAR international collaboration experiment and, for the first time, observed a new type of antimatter supernucleus, anti-superhydrogen-4, in relativistic heavy ion collisions. This is the heaviest antimatter supernucleus experimentally discovered to date.
The anti-superhydrogen-4 observed in this study was produced in relativistic heavy ion collisions. The research team analyzed the experimental data from about 6.6 billion heavy ion collision events and reconstructed anti-helium-4 and π+ mesons through decay to reconstruct anti-superhydrogen-4 in reverse. They obtained about 16 signals of anti-superhydrogen-4. The team also measured the lifetime of anti-superhydrogen-4 and compared it with the corresponding positive particle superhydrogen-4. The study shows that there is no significant difference in the measured lifetime between the two, which further verifies the symmetry of the properties of matter and antimatter.
STAR is a large international experimental collaboration group on RHIC, consisting of more than 700 researchers from 14 countries and 74 units. This work was led by the research team of Qiu Hao from the Institute of Modern Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, with outstanding contributions from PhD student Wu Junlin (jointly trained by Lanzhou University) and Lu Tan in physical analysis. The Chinese Academy of Sciences team made important contributions to the decay particle reconstruction technology and efficiency calculation.
On August 21, the relevant research results were published in Nature.
