Scribd
Upload
27 views

In The Beginning

The document discusses the origins of matter in the universe. It explains that in the early universe after the Big Bang, there was a lot of energy in the form of photons. These photons were energetic enough to spontaneously decay into particle-antiparticle pairs. However, for some reason there ended up being slightly more particles than antiparticles, leading to the matter that exists today. One theory for this asymmetry is electroweak baryogenesis, which suggests that interactions between the weak and electromagnetic forces in the early universe may have created more baryons (protons and neutrons) than antibaryons.

Uploaded by

Elma Ortega Camion
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
27 views

In The Beginning

The document discusses the origins of matter in the universe. It explains that in the early universe after the Big Bang, there was a lot of energy in the form of photons. These photons were energetic enough to spontaneously decay into particle-antiparticle pairs. However, for some reason there ended up being slightly more particles than antiparticles, leading to the matter that exists today. One theory for this asymmetry is electroweak baryogenesis, which suggests that interactions between the weak and electromagnetic forces in the early universe may have created more baryons (protons and neutrons) than antibaryons.

Uploaded by

Elma Ortega Camion
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 2

In the beginning, there was not yet any matter.

However, there was a lot of energy in the form of light,


which comes in discrete packets called photons. When photons have enough energy, they can
spontaneously decay into a particle and an antiparticle. (An antiparticle is the exact opposite of the
corresponding particle--for example, a proton has charge +e, so an antiproton has charge -e.) This is
easily observed today, as gamma rays have enough energy to create measurable
electron-antielectron pairs (the antielectron is usually called a positron). It turns out that the photon
is just one of a class of particles, called the bosons, that decay in this manner. Many of the bosons
around just after the big bang were so energetic that they could decay into much more massive
particles such as protons (remember, E=mc2, so to make a particle with a large mass m, you need a
boson with a high energy E). The mass in the universe came from such decays.

The next question to ask is: where did all the antimatter go? For each particle created in this fashion,
there is exactly one antiparticle. In this case, there should have been exactly as much antimatter as
there is matter. If that were true, when the universe had cooled somewhat each particle would have
found an antiparticle and combined to form a boson (this process is called annihilation of the
particles). Actually, this was the fate of most of these pairs--something like 10 billion particles
annihilated for every one that survived. The survival of even such a small fraction was enough to form
all of the matter in our universe. At some point during this process, something else must have
happened to cause the survival of more particles than antiparticles (we call this the
particle-antiparticle asymmetry).

There are many theories that try to explain this asymmetry. I will give a very brief description of one
of them, called electroweak baryogenesis. (Understanding it requires a lot more background
information than I have space for.) Protons and neutrons are particles called baryons, and
baryogenesis means the creation of baryons. The current understanding of particle physics, called the
standard model, dictates that nowadays the number of baryons is nearly constant, with only a small
variation due to quantum mechanical tunneling. In the early universe, however, the temperature was
much higher, so that this tunneling was commonplace and a large number of baryons could have
been created. Electroweak refers to the time period in question, when the electromagnetic and weak
forces were decoupling from a single force into 2 separate forces (between 10-12 and 10-6 seconds
after the big bang--the asymmetry probably would have formed towards the end). An additional
source of baryons is due to the fact that leptons (another type of particle, including electrons) can be
converted into baryons at this epoch.

ISOTOPE: each of two or more forms of the same element that contain equal
numbers of protons but different numbers of neutrons in their nuclei, and
hence differ in relative atomic mass but not in chemical properties; in particular,
a radioactive form of an element.

Nucleosynthesis. About two minutes after the Big Bang, the universe cooled
down enough to allow for protons and neutrons to hook up and form deuterons,
nuclei of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) consisting of a proton and a neutron.
Meaning, a process ofnucleosynthesis, the formation of new atomic nuclei,
had begun.
Redshift:

You might also like