A “knot dominated era” may have existed in the early universe: study

Summary

The model suggests a brief "knot-dominated era," when these tangled energy fields outweighed everything else, a scenario that could be probed through gravitational-wave signals. Credit: Muneto Nitta In 1867, Lord Kelvin imagined atoms as knots in the aether. The idea was soon disproven. Atoms turned out to be something else entirely. But his discarded vision may yet hold the key to why the universe exists. Now, for the first time, Japanese physicists have shown that knots can arise in a realistic particle physics framework, one that also tackles deep puzzles such as neutrino masses, dark matter, and the strong CP problem. Their findings, in Physical Review Letters, suggest these "cosmic knots" could have formed and briefly dominated in the turbulent newborn universe, collapsing in ways that favored matter over antimatter and leaving behind a unique hum in spacetime that future detectors could listen for—a rarity for a physics mystery that's notoriously hard to probe. "This study addresses one of the most fundamental mysteries in physics: why our universe is made of matter and not antimatter," said study corresponding author Muneto Nitta, professor (special appointment) at Hiroshima University's International Institute for Sustainability with Knotted Chiral Meta Matter (WPI-SKCM2) in Japan. "This question is important because it touches directly on why stars, galaxies, and we ourselves exist at all." The universe's missing antimatter The Big Bang should have produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter, each particle destroying its twin until only radiation remained. Yet the universe is overwhelmingly made of matter, with almost no antimatter in sight. Calculations show that everything we see today, from atoms to galaxies, exists because just one extra particle of matter survived for every billion matter–antimatter pairs. The Standard Model of particle physics, despite its extraordinary success, cannot account for that discrepancy. Its predictions fall many orders...