entire time I was reading this piece I was like:
matter antimatter asymmetry,
matter antimatter asymmetry...
Just over and over..."
Because it seemed so similar.
I didn't hit on it yesterday because
I wanted to concentrate on what the researchers had found.
So here we go today :-).
"At or near the time of the universe’s birth, a field known as the inflation is thought to have permeated space. A roiling, boiling medium where inflation particles continuously bubbled up and disappeared, the inflation field was also repulsive; for the brief time it may have existed, it would have caused our universe to rapidly expand to 100 trillion trillion times its original size. All of those quantum fluctuations of particles in the inflation field were flung outward and frozen into the cosmos, becoming variations in the density of matter. The denser pockets continued to gravitationally coalesce to produce the galaxies and large-scale structure we see today."
"In 1999, researchers including Kamionkowski considered what would happen if more than one field was present before this explosion. The inflation field could have interacted with another field that could produce right-handed and left-handed particles. If the inflation treated right-handed particles differently than the left-handed ones, then it could have preferentially created particles of one handedness over the other. This so-called Chern-Simons coupling would have imbued the early quantum fluctuations with a preferred handedness, which would have evolved into an imbalance of left-handed and right-handed tetrahedral arrangements of galaxies."
(Yeah...right...
"inflation treated right-handed particles
differently than the left-handed ones"
Why would it even have a preference?
It's like saying the grass gets to choose what color its gonna be.
I'd go with:
"an unknown,
parity-violating ingredient
in the primordial process
that sowed the seeds
of all the structure
that developed
in our universe"
before I would inflation
just decided on its own
what "handedness" it preferred.
It has a "brain"
with which to make such a decision?
Or?
Was it designed (by a brain)
to operate in that manner?
I mean come on people...")
"As for what the additional field might be, one possibility is the gravitational field. In this scenario, a parity-violating Chern-Simons interaction would occur between inflation particles and gravitons — the quantum units of gravity
(Here?
The writer and the editor
BOTH
should have pointed out that
gravitons are hypothetical particles.).
— which would have popped up in the gravitational field during inflation. Such an interaction would have created a handedness in the density variations of the early universe and, consequently, in today’s large-scale structure.
(Okay, very interesting
but it doesn't answer the question of:
WHY?)
"In 2006, Stephon Alexander, a physicist now at Brown University, suggested that Chern-Simons gravity could also potentially solve one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology: why our universe contains more matter than antimatter. He surmised that the Chern-Simons interaction could have yielded a relative abundance of left-handed gravitons, which would in turn preferentially create left-handed matter over right-handed antimatter.
Alexander’s idea remained relatively obscure for years. When he heard about the new findings, he said, “that was a big surprise.”
One more time:
"The tetrahedron is the simplest shape that has parity, or handedness. It looks different when reflected in a mirror."
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