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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 20 2018, @12:48PM   Printer-friendly
from the witty-comment-about-Illudium-PU-36-goes-here dept.

New Finding of Particle Physics may Help to Explain the Absence of Antimatter:

In the Standard Model of particle physics, there is almost no difference between matter and antimatter. But there is an abundance of evidence that our observable universe is made up only of matter -- if there was any antimatter, it would annihilate with nearby matter to produce very high intensity gamma radiation, which has not been observed. Therefore, figuring out how we ended up with an abundance of only matter is one of the biggest open questions in particle physics.

[...] About ten picoseconds after the Big Bang -- right about the time the Higgs boson was turning on -- the universe was a hot plasma of particles.

"The technique of dimensional reduction lets us replace the theory which describes this hot plasma with a simpler quantum theory with a set of rules that all the particles must follow," explains Dr. David Weir, the corresponding author of the article.

"It turns out that the heavier, slower-moving particles don't matter very much when these new rules are imposed, so we end up with a much less complicated theory."

This theory can then be studied with computer simulations, which provide a clear picture of what happened. In particular, they can tell us how violently out of equilibrium the universe was when the Higgs boson turned on. This is important for determining whether there was scope for producing the matter-antimatter asymmetry at this time in the history of the universe using the Two Higgs Doublet Model.

"Our results showed that it is indeed possible to explain the absence of antimatter and remain in agreement with existing observations," Dr. Weir remarks. Importantly, by making use of dimensional reduction, the new approach was completely independent of any previous work in this model.

Journal Reference:
Jens O. Andersen, Tyler Gorda, Andreas Helset, Lauri Niemi, Tuomas V. I. Tenkanen, Anders Tranberg, Aleksi Vuorinen, David J. Weir. Nonperturbative Analysis of the Electroweak Phase Transition in the Two Higgs Doublet Model. Physical Review Letters, 2018; 121 (19) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.191802


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  • (Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @02:43PM (7 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @02:43PM (#764240)

    What predictions have they deduced from this new explanation?

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  • (Score: 2) by pe1rxq on Tuesday November 20 2018, @03:09PM (6 children)

    by pe1rxq (844) on Tuesday November 20 2018, @03:09PM (#764249) Homepage

    From the fucking article:

    If the Higgs boson turned on in such a violent way, it would have left echoes. As the bubbles of the new phase of the universe nucleated, much like clouds, and expanded until the universe was like an overcast sky, the collisions between the bubbles would have produced lots of gravitational waves. Researchers at the University of Helsinki and elsewhere are now gearing up to look for these gravitational waves at missions such as the European LISA project.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @03:15PM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @03:15PM (#764253)

      So they predicted that gravitational waves would exist?

      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @05:41PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @05:41PM (#764311)

        Presumably there is something about these gravitational waves that would allow them to be distinguished from the ones created by collisions between black holes and/or neutron stars, so that the hypothesis can be tested.

        Unfortunately what is not explained in the article is what any of it has to do with antimatter. They just sort of state that it explains why there isn't any, but without any further details.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @06:48PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @06:48PM (#764335)

        I think they mean a specific looking G-wave, but it is hard to tell.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @01:13AM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @01:13AM (#764504)

          It looks like gibberish to me. Why doesnt anyone come up with predictions that normal people can test like "there will be a supernova on this day at that point in the sky", or "if you combine these things a big explosion will happen". Instead its just a bunch of highly statistical stuff that requires millions or billions of dollars. Seems like a recipe for disaster.

          • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @08:15AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 21 2018, @08:15AM (#764625)

            It's a fucking miracle we can get as far as we have, and if it weren't for how staggeringly low the bar of Turing equivalence is we'd be totally fucked.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @09:59PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 20 2018, @09:59PM (#764419)

        They predict specific gravitational waves, not the existence of them per se.