The Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe is a research institute.
The potential for the inflaton has a shape and starts away from its minimum. A field starts rolling around at the end of inflation. There are blobs of field in different patches. These blobs melt so quickly they are almost completely gone. Waves in space and time are enhanced by sudden vanishing. The ripples could be detected by the detectors. Credit: Kavli.
A new study in Physical Review Letters states that it might be possible to detect Q-balls in the waves that are caused by the collision of two stars.
The reason humans exist is that at some point in the first second of the Universe, more matter was produced than anti-matter. The asymmetry is so small that only one extra particle of matter was produced. Current theories of physics can't explain the small asymmetry. The existence of humans, Earth, and everything else in the universe proves that there must be more undiscovered physics.
The idea that this asymmetry was created after inflation is a popular one among researchers. A blob of field could have stretched out over the horizon to evolve and fragment in the right way to produce this asymmetry.
It has been difficult to test this paradigm directly since the energy involved is billions to trillions of times higher than what humans can produce on Earth.
A group of researchers in Japan and the US, including Graham White of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe Project, have found a new way to test the proposal.
The nature of Q-balls is difficult to understand, but they are a type of particle known as a boson.
When the field is excited, there is a Higgs particle. The field can do other things, like form a lump. If you have a field that is very similar to the Higgs field, one lump has the charge as one particle. The field has to decide whether to be in particles or lump. The field will do that if it is lower energy than particles. A bunch of lump will make a ball.
Q-balls stick around for a while, we argue. As the Universe expands, the Q-balls diminish slower than the background radiation, until most of the energy in the Universe is in these blobs. When blobs dominate, the density of the soup of radiation starts to grow. When the Q-balls decay, their decay is so sudden and rapid that the fluctuations in the plasma become violent sound waves which could be detected over the next few decades. The Universe is completely transparent to all of the waves that come before it, said White.
The researchers found that the conditions to create these ripples are very common, and that the resulting waves should be large enough and low enough to be detected by the detectors.
"If this is how the asymmetry was made, it is almost certain that we will soon detect a signal from the beginning of time to confirm the theory on why we exist at all," said White.
Their study was published in the Physical Review Letters.
Graham White and his colleagues wrote about detecting giltational wave signals from a movie. There is a DOI for the topic "PhysRevLett. 127.181601."
Journal information: Physical Review Letters.
The Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe is a nonprofit organization.
There is a key to answering why more matter was left over after Big bang.
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