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from the Higgsldy-Piggsldy-my-dark-boson,-she-makes-matter-for-everyone dept.
Space reports on a potential solution to the baryon asymmetry problem (why the ratio of matter to antimatter in our universe is ~1 billion to 1).
The puzzler is that in almost all interactions, matter and antimatter are created in equal proportion. It is apparently a fundamental symmetry of the universe. Yet,
Somehow, when the universe was incredibly young, almost all the antimatter disappeared, leaving just the normal stuff. Theorists have long stalked the ever-elusive explanation — and more important, a way to test that explanation with experiments.
Three physicists from Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York and the University of Kansas have proposed a new theory, published in arXiv, that details a possible solution involving three Higgs Bosons. One of these is the Higgs we know at 125GeV with two proposed new ones in the 1 TeV neighborhood.
The two new Higgs decay into showers of particles at slightly different rates and with slightly different preferences for matter over antimatter. These differences build up over time, and when the electroweak force splits up, there's enough of a difference in matter-antimatter particle populations "built in" to the universe that normal matter ends up dominating over antimatter.
The abstract of the paper notes that the prediction "is in principle a testable model." This testing may have to wait for another generation of colliders however.
It is also worth noting that 1000GeV appears to be at least in part a prediction of convenience to facilitate testing, the theory could be reworked for higher values, but "There's no use predicting the existence of a particle that can never be detected."
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday September 30 2019, @04:01PM (2 children)
Well, *I* have a non-testable theory of why that happened. It goes roughly like this:
1) an anti-matter particle is an ordinary particle moving backwards in time.
2) time was not created by the big bang.
3) during the big bang equal amounts of matter and anti-matter were created
4) The anti-matter progressed one way through time and the matter progressed the other way
The only dubious part of this theory that I see is step 2, which most physicists seem to disagree with, though I don't know why. If time didn't precede the big bang, how did it find enough time to happen in. Matter-gy slows down time, so without it's presence time should flow faster, but I'm not aware of the theory actually predicting that time started, except in the sense that if you can't measure something it isn't there, which is a philosophical position that seems to me equivalent to solipsism.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday September 30 2019, @04:18PM (1 child)
Except accordig to currently accepted theories, the big bang didn't create matter. The early universe (the first few nanoseconds) was too hot for matter (including antimatter) to exist. It created energy, which decayed into increasingly complex forms of matter as things cooled down enough for them to exist.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday September 30 2019, @07:43PM
That matter, whichever particle arrangement that means to you, wasn't created until things cooled from the big bang isn't an argument against this theory. The energy that turned into matter and anti-matter would annihilate anything headed in the wrong time direction. All you need to do is suppose that the expansion into time was symmetric. (Anti-)matter of the wrong type would turn around and head back into the time when the energy would reconvert it into energy...unless it was moving quickly enough (HAH!) to get through that period without being converted. So you still get two "horns of creation" each full of what the other horn would think of as antimatter.
This doesn't seem to have any possible test, so it's not science. But AFAICT it is consistent with science. But it does require time to preexist.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.