Baryogenesis

In physical cosmology, baryogenesis is the physical process that is hypothesized to have taken place during the early universe to produce baryonic asymmetry, i.e. the imbalance of matter (baryons) and antimatter (antibaryons) in the observed universe.

One of the outstanding problems in modern physics is the predominance of matter over antimatter in the universe. The universe, as a whole, seems to have a nonzero positive baryon number density – that is, matter exists. Since it is assumed in cosmology that the particles we see were created using the same physics we measure today, it would normally be expected that the overall baryon number should be zero, as matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. This has led to a number of proposed mechanisms for symmetry breaking that favour the creation of normal matter (as opposed to antimatter) under certain conditions. This imbalance would have been exceptionally small, on the order of 1 in every 10000000000 (10¹⁰) particles a small fraction of a second after the Big Bang, but after most of the matter and antimatter annihilated, what was left over was all the baryonic matter in the current universe, along with a much greater number of bosons. Experiments reported in 2010 at Fermilab, however, seem to show that this imbalance is much greater than previously assumed. In an experiment involving a series of particle collisions, the amount of generated matter was approximately 1% larger than the amount of generated antimatter. The reason for this discrepancy is yet unknown.

Most grand unified theories explicitly break the baryon number symmetry, which would account for this discrepancy, typically invoking reactions mediated by very massive X bosons (
X
) or massive Higgs bosons (
H⁰
). The rate at which these events occur is governed largely by the mass of the intermediate
X
or
H⁰
particles, so by assuming these reactions are responsible for the majority of the baryon number seen today, a maximum mass can be calculated above which the rate would be too slow to explain the presence of matter today. These estimates predict that a large volume of material will occasionally exhibit a spontaneous proton decay, which has not been observed. Therefore, the imbalance between matter and antimatter remains a mystery.

Baryogenesis theories are based on different descriptions of the interaction between fundamental particles. Two main theories are electroweak baryogenesis (standard model), which would occur during the electroweak epoch, and the GUT baryogenesis, which would occur during or shortly after the grand unification epoch. Quantum field theory and statistical physics are used to describe such possible mechanisms.

Baryogenesis is followed by primordial nucleosynthesis, when atomic nuclei began to form.

Unsolved problem in physics:

Why does the observable universe have more matter than antimatter?

(more unsolved problems in physics)

Background

The Dirac equation, formulated by Paul Dirac around 1928 as part of the development of relativistic quantum mechanics, predicts the existence of antiparticles along with the expected solutions for the corresponding particles. Since then, experiments have verified that every known kind of particle has a corresponding antiparticle. Under the CPT theorem, a particle and its antiparticle have the same mass and lifetime, and opposite charge. Given this symmetry, it is puzzling that the universe does not have equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Indeed, there is no experimental evidence that there are any significant concentrations of antimatter in the observable universe.

There are two main interpretations for this disparity: either the universe began with a small preference for matter (total baryonic number of the universe different from zero), or the universe was originally perfectly symmetric, but somehow a set of phenomena contributed to a small imbalance in favour of matter over time. The second point of view is preferred, although there is no clear experimental evidence indicating either of them to be the correct one.

Matter formation in the early universe

The majority of ordinary matter in the universe is found in atomic nuclei, which are made of neutrons and protons. These neutrons and protons are made up of smaller particles called quarks. For every type of matter particle there is a corresponding antiparticle with the same mass and the opposite charge. It is hypothesized that during the first few instants of the universe, it was composed of almost equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and thus contained nearly equal number of quarks and antiquarks. Once the universe expanded and cooled to a critical temperature of approximately 2×10¹² K, quarks combined into normal matter and antimatter. Antimatter annihilated with matter up to the small initial asymmetry of about one part in five billion, leaving the matter around us. Free and separate individual quarks and antiquarks have never been observed in experiments—quarks and antiquarks are always found in groups of three (baryons), or bound in quark–antiquark pairs (mesons).

GUT Baryogenesis under Sakharov conditions

In 1967, Andrei Sakharov proposed a set of three necessary conditions that a baryon-generating interaction must satisfy to produce matter and antimatter at different rates. These conditions were inspired by the recent discoveries of the cosmic background radiation and CP-violation in the neutral kaon system. The three necessary "Sakharov conditions" are:

• Baryon number $B$ violation.
• C-symmetry and CP-symmetry violation.
• Interactions out of thermal equilibrium.

Baryon number violation is obviously a necessary condition to produce an excess of baryons over anti-baryons. But C-symmetry violation is also needed so that the interactions which produce more baryons than anti-baryons will not be counterbalanced by interactions which produce more anti-baryons than baryons. CP-symmetry violation is similarly required because otherwise equal numbers of left-handed baryons and right-handed anti-baryons would be produced, as well as equal numbers of left-handed anti-baryons and right-handed baryons. Finally, the interactions must be out of thermal equilibrium, since otherwise CPT symmetry would assure compensation between processes increasing and decreasing the baryon number.

Currently, there is no experimental evidence of particle interactions where the conservation of baryon number is broken perturbatively: this would appear to suggest that all observed particle reactions have equal baryon number before and after. Mathematically, the commutator of the baryon number quantum operator with the (perturbative) Standard Model hamiltonian is zero: $[B,H]=BH-HB=0$. However, the Standard Model is known to violate the conservation of baryon number only non-perturbatively: a global U(1) anomaly. To account for baryon violation in baryogenesis, such events (including proton decay) can occur in Grand Unification Theories (GUTs) and supersymmetric (SUSY) models via hypothetical massive bosons such as the X boson.

The second condition – violation of CP-symmetry – was discovered in 1964 (direct CP-violation, that is violation of CP-symmetry in a decay process, was discovered later, in 1999). Due to CPT symmetry, violation of CP-symmetry demands violation of time inversion symmetry, or T-symmetry.

In the out-of-equilibrium decay scenario, the last condition states that the rate of a reaction which generates baryon-asymmetry must be less than the rate of expansion of the universe. In this situation the particles and their corresponding antiparticles do not achieve thermal equilibrium due to rapid expansion decreasing the occurrence of pair-annihilation.

Baryogenesis within the Standard Model

Electroweak baryogenesis

The Standard Model can incorporate baryogenesis, though the amount of net baryons (and leptons) thus created may not be sufficient to account for the present baryon asymmetry. This issue has not yet been determined decisively.

Baryogenesis within the Standard Model requires the electroweak symmetry breaking be a first-order phase transition, since otherwise sphalerons wipe off any baryon asymmetry that happened up to the phase transition, while later the amount of baryon non-conserving interactions is negligible.

The phase transition domain wall breaks the P-symmetry spontaneously, allowing for CP-symmetry violating interactions to create C-asymmetry on both its sides: quarks tend to accumulate on the broken phase side of the domain wall, while anti-quarks tend to accumulate on its unbroken phase side. This happens as follows:

Due to CP-symmetry violating electroweak interactions, some amplitudes involving quarks are not equal to the corresponding amplitudes involving anti-quarks, but rather have opposite phase (see CKM matrix and Kaon); since time reversal takes an amplitude to its complex conjugate, CPT-symmetry is conserved.

Though some of their amplitudes have opposite phases, both quarks and anti-quarks have positive energy, and hence acquire the same phase as they move in space-time. This phase also depends on their mass, which is identical but depends both on flavor and on the Higgs VEV which changes along the domain wall. Thus certain sums of amplitudes for quarks have different absolute values compared to those of anti-quarks. In all, quarks and anti-quarks may have different reflection and transmission probabilities through the domain wall, and it turns out that more quarks coming from the unbroken phase are transmitted compared to anti-quarks.

Thus there is a net baryonic flux through the domain wall. Due to sphaleron transitions, which are abundant in the unbroken phase, the net anti-baryonic content of the unbroken phase is wiped off. However, sphalerons are rare enough in the broken phase as not to wipe off the excess of baryons there. In total, there is net creation of baryons.

In this scenario, non-perturbative electroweak interactions (i.e. the sphaleron) are responsible for the B-violation, the perturbative electroweak Lagrangian is responsible for the CP-violation, and the domain wall is responsible for the lack of thermal equilibrium; together with the CP-violation it also creates a C-violation in each of its sides.

Matter content in the universe

See also: Baryon asymmetry

Baryon asymmetry parameter

The challenges to the physics theories are then to explain how to produce this preference of matter over antimatter, and also the magnitude of this asymmetry. An important quantifier is the asymmetry parameter, naïvely given by

$\eta ={\frac {n_{B}-n_{\bar {B}}}{n_{\gamma }}}$.

This quantity relates the overall number density difference between baryons and antibaryons (n_B and n_B, respectively) and the number density of cosmic background radiation photons n_γ.

According to the Big Bang model, matter decoupled from the cosmic background radiation (CBR) at a temperature of roughly 3000 kelvin, corresponding to an average kinetic energy of 3000 K / (10.08×10³ K/eV) = 0.3 eV. After the decoupling, the total number of CBR photons remains constant. Therefore, due to space-time expansion, the photon density decreases. The photon density at equilibrium temperature T per cubic centimeter, is given by

$n_{\gamma }={\frac {1}{\pi ^{2}}}{\left({\frac {k_{B}T}{\hbar c}}\right)}^{3}\int _{0}^{\infty }{\frac {x^{2}}{e^{x}-1}}\operatorname {d} x={\frac {2\zeta (3)}{\pi ^{2}}}{\left({\frac {k_{B}T}{\hbar c}}\right)}^{3}\approx 20.3\left({\frac {T}{1{\text{K}}}}\right)^{3}{\text{cm}}^{-3}$,

with k_B as the Boltzmann constant, ħ as the Planck constant divided by 2π and c as the speed of light in vacuum, and ζ(3) as Apéry's constant. At the current CBR photon temperature of 2.725 K, this corresponds to a photon density n_γ of around 411 CBR photons per cubic centimeter.

Therefore, the asymmetry parameter η, as defined above, is not the "best" parameter. Instead, the preferred asymmetry parameter uses the entropy density s,

$\eta _{s}={\frac {n_{B}-n_{\bar {B}}}{s}}$

because the entropy density of the universe remained reasonably constant throughout most of its evolution. The entropy density is

$s\ {\stackrel {\mathrm {def} }{=}}\ {\frac {\mathrm {entropy} }{\mathrm {volume} }}={\frac {p+\rho }{T}}={\frac {2\pi ^{2}}{45}}g_{\text{⁎}}(T)T^{3}$

with p and ρ as the pressure and density from the energy density tensor T_μν, and g_⁎ as the effective number of degrees of freedom for "massless" particles at temperature T (in so far as mc² ≪ k_BT holds),

$g_{\text{⁎}}(T)=\sum _{\mathrm {i=bosons} }g_{i}{\left({\frac {T_{i}}{T}}\right)}^{3}+{\frac {7}{8}}\sum _{\mathrm {j=fermions} }g_{j}{\left({\frac {T_{j}}{T}}\right)}^{3}$,

for bosons and fermions with g_i and g_j degrees of freedom at temperatures T_i and T_j respectively. At the present epoch, s = 7.04 n_γ.

See also

• Affleck–Dine mechanism
• Anthropic principle
• Big Bang
• Chronology of the universe
• CP violation
• Leptogenesis (physics)
• Lepton

References

Textbooks

• E. W. Kolb; M. S. Turner (1994). The Early Universe. Perseus Publishing. ISBN 978-0-201-62674-2. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |lastauthoramp= ignored (|name-list-style= suggested) (help)

Preprints

• A. D. Dolgov (1997). "Baryogenesis, 30 Years After". Surveys in High Energy Physics. 13 (1–3): 83–117. arXiv:hep-ph/9707419. Bibcode:1998SHEP...13...83D. doi:10.1080/01422419808240874.
• A. Riotto (1998). "Theories of Baryogenesis". High Energy Physics and Cosmology: 326. arXiv:hep-ph/9807454. Bibcode:1999hepc.conf..326R.
• M. Trodden (1999). "Electroweak Baryogenesis". Reviews of Modern Physics. 71 (5): 1463–1500. arXiv:hep-ph/9803479. Bibcode:1999RvMP...71.1463T. doi:10.1103/RevModPhys.71.1463.