Kavli IPMU: How Particles Saved Us from Annihilation

bystander · Post by **bystander** » Tue Feb 04, 2020 5:06 pm

How the Tiniest Particles in Our Universe Saved Us from Complete Annihilation
Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe | 2020 Feb 03

Inflation stretched the initial microscopic Universe to a macroscopic size and turned the cosmic energy into matter. However, it likely created an equal amount of matter and anti-matter predicting complete annihilation of our universe. The authors discuss the possibility that a phase transition after inflation led to a tiny imbalance between the amount of matter and anti-matter, so that some matter could survive a near-complete annihilation. (Credit: Kavli IPMU - Kavli IPMU modified this figure based on the image credited by R.Hurt/JPL-Caltech, NASA, and ESA)
Recently discovered ripples of spacetime called gravitational waves could contain evidence to prove the theory that life survived the Big Bang because of a phase transition that allowed neutrino particles to reshuffle matter and anti-matter, explains a new study by an international team of researchers.

How we were saved from a complete annihilation is not a question in science fiction or a Hollywood movie. According to the Big Bang theory of modern cosmology, matter was created with an equal amount of anti-matter. If it had stayed that way, matter and anti-matter should have eventually met and annihilated one to one, leading up to a complete annihilation.

But our existence contradicts this theory. To overcome a complete annihilation, the Universe must have turned a small amount of anti-matter into matter creating an imbalance between them. The imbalance needed is only a part in a billion. But it has remained a complete mystery when and how the imbalance was created. ...

Since matter and anti-matter have the opposite electrical charges, they cannot turn into each other, unless they are electrical neutral. Neutrinos are the only electrical neutral matter particles we know, and they are the strongest contender to do this job. A theory many researchers support is that the Universe went through a phase transition so that neutrinos could reshuffle matter and anti-matter. ...

Testing the Seesaw Mechanism and Leptogenesis with Gravitational Waves ~ Jeff A. Dror et al

Physical Review Letters 124(04):1804 (31 Jan 2020) DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.041804
arXiv.org > hep-ph > arXiv:1908.03227 > 08 Aug 2019