From ScienceDaily:
st 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.
…
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, who is also a senior scientist with the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe.
Abstract in Physical Review Letters: here:
The recent measurement of the Higgs boson mass implies a relatively slow rise of the Standard Model Higgs potential at large scales, and a possible second minimum at even larger scales. Consequently, the Higgs field may develop a large vacuum expectation value during inflation. The relaxation of the Higgs field from its large postinflationary value to the minimum of the effective potential represents an important stage in the evolution of the universe. During this epoch, the time-dependent Higgs condensate can create an effective chemical potential for the lepton number, leading to a generation of the lepton asymmetry in the presence of some large right-handed Majorana neutrino masses. The electroweak sphalerons redistribute this asymmetry between leptons and baryons. This Higgs relaxation leptogenesis can explain the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry of the universe even if the Standard Model is valid up to the scale of inflation, and any new physics is suppressed by that high scale. (paywall)
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“The Higgs field “had to descend to the equilibrium, in a process of ‘Higgs relaxation,'”
The “God Particle” rested after all the heavy lifting. Sounds good.
when reading the abstract, I used Commander Data’s voice in my head. That made it somewhat bearable.
Some background notes: The Higgs Boson, to the disappointment of atheists, joined the fine-tuned club:
Strangely, the Higgs Boson, although it is said to account for why particles have mass, ‘still’ gives no insight into unifying gravity with quantum theory:
As well, the original nickname for the Higgs Boson, i.e. The ‘God’ Particle, was vastly overblown:
It is also interesting to note that Dr. Craig used the example of Peter Higgs mathematical prediction for the Higgs boson, which Peter Higgs had made decades before it was discovered by the LHC, as a philosophical proof for Theism:
Of interest to theoretical mathematics that are fruitful to the progress of science, it is said that the best mathematical theories, that are later confirmed empirically to be true, are born out of the mathematicians ‘sense of beauty’. Dyson thought Higgs work was beautiful.
Paul Dirac is also said to have mathematically discovered the ‘anti-electron’, before it was empirically confirmed, through his mathematical ‘sense of beauty’:
In January 1933, the Belgian mathematician and Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre traveled with Albert Einstein to California for a series of seminars. After the Belgian detailed his Big Bang theory, Einstein stood up applauded, and said,
‘Mathematical beauty’ even had a guiding hand in the recent discovery of the Amplituhedron:
Alex Vilenkin, famous for mathematically proving that any universe experiencing expansion must have a beginning, commenting on Euler’s Identity, states,,,
And indeed, when mathematicians are shown Euler’s identity or the Pythagorean identity the same area of the brain used to appreciate fine art or music lights up:
But where this ‘sense of beauty’ in mathematics, that apparently has been so fruitful for science, breaks down is with string theory, and m-theory:
The reason why I point out the mathematicians ‘sense of beauty’ is because ‘The argument from beauty’ is a Theistic argument:
Although the following article is somewhat technical, it is almost comical to read how every approach, in which the materialists tried to reduce the ‘sense of beauty’ to a mere material mechanism, was thwarted.
Verse and Music: