Baryogenesis - WTF?

Germaine recently reported that a neutrino detector has successfully detected an antineutrino. The antineutrino is the antimatter counterpart of a neutrino, a particle “so small its mass was long thought to be zero” (Wikipedia). “‘This is actually huge,’ says neutrino physicist Kate Scholberg of Duke University,” without a trace of irony.


The sum total of Dan T’s knowledge of particle physics rhymes neatly with “hero,” so Dan decided to be a hero and look into the matter. Or is that “antimatter.” What Dan T found would certainly be disturbing if he understood it. Antimatter is “composed of the antiparticles (or ‘partners’) of the corresponding particles in ‘ordinary’ matter, and can be thought of as matter with reversed charge, parity, and time.”


Wait. Reversed time? WTF.


It gets worse. There should be the same amount of matter and antimatter, but there isn’t. Baryogenesis is the hypothesised mechanism which accounts for this little problem. I’ll let Wikipedia take over from here: 


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. There is a required one excess quark per billion quark-antiquark pairs in the early universe in order to provide all the observed matter in the universe.[3] This insufficiency has not yet been explained, theoretically or otherwise.

Baryogenesis within the Standard Model requires the electroweak symmetry breaking to be a first-order cosmological phase transition, since otherwise sphalerons wipe out any baryon asymmetry that happened up to the phase transition. Beyond this, the remaining amount of baryon non-conserving interactions is negligible.[14]

Or maybe the answer is that there’s an anti-universe that “would flow back in time from the Big Bang, becoming bigger as it does so, and would be also dominated by antimatter.”


By Eduemoni - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86585553




Question for discussion:


WTF?


(OP by Dan T)

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