Antihelium Offers Hope in the Search for Dark Matter

In 2010, physicists at the Large Hadron Collider began producing an exotic form of antimatter known as antihelium. Antimatter is that elusive substance that annihilates upon meeting regular matter, and antihelium is the antimatter twin of the classic helium atom, the stuff you find in party balloons. While no human has ever conclusively found a naturally occurring antihelium particle on Earth, it could be key to answering one of the biggest outstanding mysteries in physics: the nature of dark matter.

While this beast may be rare on Earth, physicists think it could be abundant in our galaxy, according to physicist Ivan Vorobyev, a researcher at CERN. That’s because they think antihelium could

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