Physicists Edge Closer to Understanding the Origin of Matter

Physicists have recreated the conditions of the early Universe in a particle accelerator by smashing atoms together at nearly the speed of light.

This approach allowed them to determine which parts of matter were created in the moments immediately following the Big Bang and which appeared later. The study, published in the journal Physics Letters B, revealed that more matter was formed later than previously expected.

At the dawn of its existence, the Universe was a searing mixture of subatomic particles. While the temperature in the Sun’s core is around 15 million degrees Celsius, the early Universe was approximately 250,000 times hotter.

Ordinary matter, which constitutes everything around us, is composed of protons and neutrons. However, the early Universe’s extreme temperatures prevented these particles from forming.

The collisions of atoms in a particle accelerator enable scientists to understand precisely how matter was created at the Universe’s inception.

Known particles were formed either from quark and gluon collisions or from subsequent particle collisions. These later collisions began occurring 0.000001 seconds after the Big Bang, as quark-made particles started interacting with each other.

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In the 1990s, physicists discovered that some particles were abundantly formed due to later collisions following the Universe’s initial formation phase. D-mesons, for instance, can interact to create the exceedingly rare charmonium particle, which is composed of two-quark mesons.

The results of the new experiment indicated that over 70% of the measured charmonium could be formed from later particle collision reactions. The number of measured particles formed in such reactions was significantly higher than expected.

This finding suggests that the majority of matter in the Universe may have originated from later particle collisions rather than from the initial subatomic particle collisions occurring moments after the Big Bang.

This discovery enhances our knowledge of the origin of matter. It helps determine how much matter was created in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang, compared to how much matter was created by later reactions as the Universe expanded.