“If axions influence antimatter’s behaviour, the effects are tiny”:
Physicists have found a few ways of breaking the matter/antimatter symmetry, but they aren’t sufficient to account for matter’s vast predominance. So, there are lots of ideas floating around to handle it, and some of them are even testable. One of the more intriguing categories of solution links the two big problems with matter: tying the prevalence of matter to the existence of a specific dark matter particle. Now, scientists have made some antimatter in a lab and used that to test one of these ideas. The test came up blank, putting limits on the possible link between dark matter and antimatter’s absence.
John Timmer, “Dark matter link to regular matter’s dominance fails to show up” at Ars Technica
It sounded like a great idea, no? Frustrating and weird separately but a breakthrough together? Not this one, it seems.