įollow Clara Moskowitz on Twitter or LiveScience. The exploration of atomic structure began in 1911, when Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealander who worked in Canada and England, discovered that atoms had a dense central. The discovery was reported this month in the journal Physical Review Letters. The rather steady increase of atomic masses through the periodic table was explained when physicists managed to split atoms into three component particles. 'It's spectacular that the solution came from the same entanglement phenomenon used for quantum communication and computing.'

'In the past, a true test of time-reversal symmetry with unstable particles was considered to be impossible,' said BaBar associate José Bernabéu, also at the University of Valencia. Using this phenomenon, the scientists were able to measure one B meson and acquire information about another particle at the same time. In the new study, scientists harnessed the power of quantum entanglement, in which two particles can be connected so that an action on one reflects in the other. Then, throughout the 1950s and 60s, particle accelerators kept revealing a bevy of exotic subatomic particles, such. Previous attempts to look for time asymmetry were not direct, because researchers were unable to disentangle time asymmetry from other asymmetries involving charge and parity (a particle characteristic akin to left- or right-handedness). Elementary particles are the fundamental building blocks of the universe. B mesons can flip between two different states called B-zero and B-even, and the BaBar data show that these transformations happened six times more often in one direction than in the other.

The particles in the experiment were B mesons, which are made of one quark and one antiquark (the antimatter partner of a quark) in the 'bottom' flavor. 'This is a sophisticated analysis, the kind of experimental work that can only be done when an experiment is mature.'

'It was exciting to design an experimental analysis that enabled us to observe, directly and unambiguously, the asymmetrical nature of time,' BaBar collaborator Fernando Martínez-Vidal, a physicist at the University of Valencia in Spain who led the study, said in a statement.

Subatomic particles