Where Has all the Anti-Matter Gone?..... Off to Mutual Annihilation - Every one.....

Yeah, I know.  A Folk singer I ain't.

But the core question is valid.  As I pointed out in a discussion last summer - If after the initial expansion, the Universe had equal amounts of matter and anti-matter - where is it all - anti- matter I mean.

But, according to the Science Daily Article -

• UCLA physicists offer a possible solution to the mystery of the origin of matter in the universe.

 The real big mystery centers around a fairly simple sounding question.  If  all matter is treated equally, then it goes without saying that there should be equal amounts of both in the Universe to date. 

My answer may have been a bit cheeky  by saying that some particles are a bit more equal than others.  But think about it for a bit.  Shortly after the "big bang" the Universe consisted of a "primordial soup" of sub-atomic particles, consisting of both matter and anti-matter.  Now as we all should know at this point is that matter/anti-matter do not tolerate each other at all.  So in the first few moments of our new Universe, matter and anti-matter got together and did what they do so very well. They blew the crap out of each other releasing two photons in the process.                                            

It was such an efficient process that virtually all the matter in the Universe was  destroyed.  99 followed by a lot of  nines.   Now I can hear the cat calls already because one only has to look up to see that the Universe is far from Empty.  But it is true, most of the Universe is just so much empty space. 

How can this be, if at the beginning there were equal amounts of both normal matter and anti-matter. 

Well for me I would put it to there being just a slight bit more matter than exotic mater. 

As is the case however, it is a bit more exciting.  From the Science Daily article:

• Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy in the UCLA College, and colleagues propose that the matter-antimatter asymmetry could be related to the Higgs boson particle      
• Specifically the asymmetry may have been produced as a result of the motion of the Higgs field, which is associated with the Higgs boson, and which could have made the masses of particles and antiparticles in the universe temporarily unequal, allowing for a small excess of matter particles over antiparticles.   

Hey, that is just a fancy way of saying that there was - for a moment- more normal matter than anti-matter!

The Science Daily article is HERE