“Majorano” – a bizarre particle that is its own opposite – could explain the universe’s greatest mysteries

There is a significant imbalance between matter and antimatter in our universe. However, a strange particle called “Majorano” may now finally explain it.

One of the most intriguing questions in modern cosmology is why the Universe is full of matter. A hidden family of “ghost particles” It may be responsible for all the dark matter in the Universe – and the reason why matter exists.

The problem is that almost all fundamental particle reactions produce exact numbers of matter and antimatter particles, which then annihilate each other in flashes of energy.

But the Universe has an abundance of matter and very little antimatter. So – he asks – why didn’t everything simply disappear in the early Universe?

The problem is known as baryogenese; and the main hypothesis is that an unknown process led to a imbalance between matter and antimatter in the first moments of the Big Bang.

But what was this process?

A study in December in arXivsuggests that the answer may lie in small ghostly particles known as neutrinos.

As Live Science explains, there are three varieties of neutrinos, and they all have bizarre properties. For one thing, they only have a small amount of mass, much smaller than the mass of electrons.

Furthermore, they are all “left-handed”, which means that their spins internal particles orient in only one direction when they travel, unlike all other particles which can orient in both directions.

This fact has led to speculation that there may be more varieties of neutrinos that have not yet been detected – the right-handed counterparts of the known neutrinos.

“A Shattered Universe”

In the new study, the researchers proposed a model in which there are two new species of right-handed neutrinos with very high masses.

The model showed that, in the early moments of the Universe, right-handed and left-handed neutrinos were in perfect balance.

As the cosmos expanded and cooled, this balance broke down, leading to a breaking of symmetries that caused left-hand neutrinos to acquire their mass and right-hand neutrinos to disappear from view.

But the researchers’ model found that this cataclysmic shift also had other consequences.

Here comes Majorano

On the one hand, as neutrinos interact with other particles, breaking their symmetry will have triggered a chain reaction that has called into question the delicate balance between matter and antimatter.

On the other hand, the right-handed neutrinos mixed to create a completely new particle, called Majorano.

Majorano is a hypothetical particle that is its own antiparticleand the researchers’ calculations showed that this particle would have been produced in abundance in the chaos of the early Universe.

This oparticle would then have survived as a relic of those times ancient, constituting most of the mass of all galaxies, but remaining invisible and elusive.

In other words, Majorano would be a strong candidate for dark matter – the mysterious hidden substance that fills the cosmos.