An important part of the LHCb physics programme is reserved for studying differences between the properties of matter and antimatter (CP violation for experts). At the EPS-HEP meeting in Grenoble this week the LHCb physicists have presented distributions in which these differences can be clearly seen.
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The blue line follows the measured points. After background subtraction (slightly sloping black line from left to right) the Kπ invariant mass distribution is divided into different components shown in different colours. The different charge combination of K and π indicates if the decaying B particle is a matter or an antimatter particle. The red curve in the upper plots shows the decay rate of B0d (matter, left plot) and anti-B0d (antimatter, right plot). The horizontal red dotted line helps to show that the decay rates of matter and antimatter B particles to Kπ mesons are different. The green distributions in lower plots show that the difference between matter and antimatter decay rate is also observed in B0s decays to Kπ.