Baryogenesis

Common card · No. 210068

In physical cosmology, baryogenesis (also known as baryosynthesis) is the physical process that is hypothesized to have taken place during the early universe to produce baryonic asymmetry, the observation that only matter (baryons) and not antimatter (antibaryons) is detected in the universe (other than in cosmic ray collisions). Since it is assumed in cosmology that the particles we see were created using the same physics we measure today, and in particle physics experiments today matter and antimatter are always symmetric, the dominance of matter over antimatter is unexplained. A number of theoretical mechanisms are proposed to account for this discrepancy, namely identifying conditions that favour symmetry breaking and the creation of normal matter (as opposed to antimatter). This imbalance has to be exceptionally small, on the order of 1 in every 1630000000 (≈2×109) particles a small fraction of a second after the Big Bang. After most of the matter and antimatter was annihilated, what...

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