Unraveling a Mystery Surrounding Cosmic Matter
hubie writes:
Early in its history, shortly after the Big Bang, the universe was filled with equal amounts of matter and "antimatter" - particles that are matter counterparts but with opposite charge. But then, as space expanded, the universe cooled. Today's universe is full of galaxies and stars which are made of matter. Where did the antimatter go, and how did matter come to dominate the universe? This cosmic origin of matter continues to puzzle scientists.
Physicists at the University of California, Riverside, and Tsinghua University in China have now opened a new pathway for probing the cosmic origin of matter by invoking the "cosmological collider."
[...] "Cosmic inflation provided a highly energetic environment, enabling the production of heavy new particles as well as their interactions," Cui said. "The inflationary universe behaved just like a cosmological collider, except that the energy was up to 10 billion times larger than any human-made collider."
[...] "The fact that our current-day universe is dominated by matter remains among the most perplexing, longstanding mysteries in modern physics," Cui said. "A subtle imbalance or asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the early universe is required to achieve today's matter dominance but cannot be realized within the known framework of fundamental physics."
Cui and Xianyu propose testing leptogenesis, a well-known mechanism that explains the origin of the baryon - visible gas and stars - asymmetry in our universe. Had the universe begun with equal amounts of matter and antimatter, they would have annihilated each other into photon radiation, leaving nothing. Since matter far exceeds antimatter today, asymmetry is required to explain the imbalance.
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