(Image source: Science and Technology Facilities Council)

BY STEVEN SPARKMAN

ANCHOR JENNIFER MECKLES

You're watching multisource science video news analysis from Newsy.

The March earthquake in Japan interrupted a particle physics experiment just 2% of the way through its testing. But that 2% may be enough for scientists to make a big find, perhaps explaining how matter came out of the Big Bang. A writer for New Scientist explains.

“Neutrinos have been caught spontaneously flip-flopping from one type to another in a way never previously seen. Further observations of this behaviour may shed light on how matter came to dominate over antimatter in the universe.”

Particle physics predicts matter and anti-matter should behave exactly the same, but if that were true, there would be no matter in the universe. So the standard model of physics must be wrong somewhere, and neutrinos are a likely candidate. If talk about neutrinos flies over your head, don’t worry: Popular Science is here to give you some background.

“A primer on neutrinos and why we should care about them: Neutrinos are one of the fundamental building blocks of matter, though they interact very weakly with normal matter … They come in three flavors: muon neutrinos, electron neutrinos, and tau neutrinos. And for the aforementioned reason they are very hard to detect.”

Neutrinos interact with normal matter so rarely, billions of them fly through your body every second without doing anything. One of the researchers tells the BBC how they study particles that barely interact, and what they might have found.

“Now, we have made a beam of these neutrinos on the east coast of Japan, because we want to study how neutrinos change as they propagate along. ... And luckily there’s a huge neutrino detector on the west coast of Japan 300 kilometers away. So we aim our neutrinos from the east coast of Japan at this detector on the west coast of Japan. … These different flavors of neutrinos -- the electron, the muon, the tau -- they change into each other as they propagate along. … And we have found a new way they change into each other.” (Image sources: University of Liverpool, Science and Technology Facilities Council. Video source: Sixty Symbols)

The new transformation means scientists have finally found evidence of all three types of neutrinos turning into one another. Once they can precisely measure how often these transformations happen, a writer for Science Magazine says they can do the same experiment with antimatter.

“If neutrinos mix into one another at different rates than antineutrinos do, then it would violate a kind of symmetry between matter and antimatter ... According to some theories, violations ... among neutrinos may explain why the infant universe came to be filled with so much matter and so little antimatter.”

The team hopes to get the experiment back up and running again by the end of the year.

Transcript by Newsy.