SoylentNews

RandomFactor [soylentnews.org] writes:

Space reports [space.com] 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 [livescience.com]. 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 [arxiv.org], 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."

Original Submission