Washington: A new research has offered a possible solution to the mystery of the origin of matter in the universe.
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.
UCLA's Alexander Kusenko 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.
If a particle and an antiparticle meet, they disappear by emitting two photons or a pair of some other particles. In the "primordial soup" that existed after the Big Bang, there were almost equal amounts of particles of antiparticles, except for a tiny asymmetry: one particle per 10 billion.
As the universe cooled, the particles and antiparticles annihilated each other in equal numbers, and only a tiny number of particles remained; this tiny amount is all the stars and planets, and gas in today's universe, said Kusenko.
The Higgs field had to descend to the equilibrium, in a process of 'Higgs relaxation,' said Kusenko, the lead author of the UCLA research.
The study is published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
