University of California, Los Angeles | 2015 Feb 24
Most of the laws of nature treat particles and antiparticles equally, but stars and planets are made of particles, or matter, and not antiparticles, or antimatter. That asymmetry, which favors matter to a very small degree, has puzzled scientists for many years.
New research by UCLA physicists, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, offers a possible solution to the mystery of the origin of matter in the universe.
Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy in the UCLA College, and colleagues propose that the matter-antimatter asymmetry could be related to the Higgs boson particle, which was the subject of prominent news coverage when it was discovered at Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider in 2012.
Specifically, the UCLA researchers write, the asymmetry may have been produced as a result of the motion of the Higgs field, which is associated with the Higgs boson, and which could have made the masses of particles and antiparticles in the universe temporarily unequal, allowing for a small excess of matter particles over antiparticles. ...
Postinflationary Higgs Relaxation and the Origin of Matter-Antimatter Asymmetry - Alexander Kusenko, Lauren Pearce, Louis Yang
- Physical Review Letters 114(6) 061302 (11 Feb 2015) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.061302
arXiv.org > hep-ph > arXiv:1410.0722 > 02 Oct 2014 (v1), 18 Feb 2015 (v3)