Did Neutrinos Save The Universe From Annihilation?

When the Universe formed there was a tiny bit more matter than antimatter. This is the only reason why we and everything around us exists. The question is – what is responsible for that? Could it be neutrinos?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

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The Cosmic Imbalance

This is a story you likely heard before. There should have been an equal amount of matter and antimatter when the Big Bang happened. But if that were the case then all matter and antimatter would annihilate immediately leaving the Universe void of matter filled only with radiation. Nonetheless, we can some that things exist. That means our story is wrong. But in what way?

We do know that it was matter that was left after the Big Bang. To have the Universe the way we have all you need to have one billion and one matter particles per every billion antimatter particles. But from where did such an imbalance arise is still a mystery.

All Praise Neutrinos – Saviors Of Everything

This cosmological mystery could be solved with gravitational waves. Gravitational waves could bring us evidence that is was neutrinos that saved us all thanks to the vacuum phase transition. This is what Jeff Dror and his coworkers from the University of California, Berkeley claim in their new study. Neutrinos are electrically neutral, unlike other particles. And thanks to the vacuum phase transition, the high temperatures of the early Universe, and the seesaw mechanism it may have achieved that.

The authors of the study explain that we know phase transitions even from our daily lives. We can encounter them during boiling a pot of coffee when water changes into vapor. Or when riding a maglev train – in superconductors. And while the vacuum phase transition should have happened a very very long time ago but we may be able to find some traceable evidence of it happening.

Physicists believe that during the vacuum phase transition incredible topological defects called cosmic strings may have been created. These still hypothetical objects that should be made from a very dense tube roughly the diameter of a proton are either closed or infinite. The ones that are closed should have the tendencies to radiate as gravitational waves.

The trick is that if this was the case if the fact that neutrinos truly saved matter in the Universe thanks to the vacuum phase transition the transition should have to create cosmic strings and these should at least partially radiated as gravitational waves that should still be traveling through the Universe. According to Dror and his team, we could observe these gravitational waves with the planned cosmic gravitational observatories such as the European Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) and the Big Bang Observer (BBO), or the Japanese Deci-Hertz Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (DECIGO)

Sources:

• https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.041804

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