ELEMENTARY PARTICLE PHYSICS

The dominance of matter over antimatter in our universe is one of the unsolved riddles of present day physics. During the early phases of our universe, matter must have been produced predominantly over antimatter, but the only such process we currently know only affects quarks, the fundamental constituents of the atomic nucleus, and does not provide enough matter dominance. In order to tackle this problem, an international team of scientists led by Wuppertal University has computed the amount of matter dominance that our present physical theories predict. Solving the complicated equations that govern the behavior of the strong nuclear force between quarks numerically, precise predictions were obtained that accurately describe the amount of matter dominance observed in laboratory experiments. This result leaves little room for speculative new sources of matter dominance in quarks and suggest that an entirely different mechanism must be responsible to explain matter dominance in our current universe.