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posted by janrinok on Monday September 30 2019, @09:48AM   Printer-friendly
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."

 


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 30 2019, @06:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 30 2019, @06:04PM (#900891)

    The imbalance woudn't "grow until one type of matter dominated" unless there was some mechanism that was preferentially pulling one type of matter into the kugelblitz

    Imagine you have 1 proton and 0 antiprotons. Then there is a 50/50 chance the next particle is a proton, in which case you have two protons. otherwise you are back to 0 protons and zero antiprotons. Then you would start over... you eventually get 1 proton and 0 antiprotons (or vice versa, "proton" just means the type that comes first). So you eventually get 2 protons, then if the next is an antiproton you are left with 1 proton and zero antiprotons... etc. Whichever type came first will preferentially grow because all the later anti-particles are going to get annihilated, while the particles do not.