No Arabic abstract
The apparent dominance of matter over antimatter in our universe is an obvious and puzzling fact which cannot be adequately explained in present physical frameworks that assume matter-antimatter symmetry at the big bang. However, our present knowledge of starting conditions and of known sources of CP violation are both insufficient to explain the observed asymmetry. Therefore ongoing research on matter-antimatter differences is strongly motivated as well as attempts to identify viable new mechanisms that could create the present asymmetry. Here we concentrate on possible precision experiments at low energies towards a resolution of this puzzle.
A CPT violating decoherence scenario can easily account for all the experimental evidence in the neutrino sector including LSND. In this work it is argued that this framework can also accommodate the Dark Energy content of the Universe, as well as the observed matter-antimatter asymmetry.
The fundamental building blocks of the proton, quarks and gluons, have been known for decades. However, we still have an incomplete theoretical and experimental understanding of how these particles and their dynamics give rise to the quantum bound state of the proton and its physical properties, such as for example its spin. The two up and the single down quarks that comprise the proton in the simplest picture account only for a few percent of the proton mass, the bulk of which is in the form of quark kinetic and potential energy and gluon energy from the strong force. An essential feature of this force, as described by quantum chromodynamics, is its ability to create matter-antimatter quark pairs inside the proton that exist only for a very short time. Their fleeting existence makes the antimatter quarks within protons difficult to study, but their existence is discernible in reactions where a matter-antimatter quark pair annihilates. In this picture of quark-antiquark creation by the strong force, the probability distributions as a function of momentum for the presence of up and down antimatter quarks should be nearly identical, since their masses are quite similar and small compared to the mass of the proton. In the present manuscript, we show evidence from muon pair production measurements that these distributions are significantly different, with more abundant down antimatter quarks than up antimatter quarks over a wide range of momentum. These results revive interest in several proposed mechanisms as the origin of this antimatter asymmetry in the proton that had been disfavored by the previous results and point to the future measurements that can distinguish between these mechanisms.
The General Antiparticle Spectrometer (GAPS) is designed to carry out indirect dark matter search by measuring low-energy cosmic-ray antiparticles. Below a few GeVs the flux of antiparticles produced by cosmic-ray collisions with the interstellar medium is expected to be very low and several well-motivated beyond-standard models predict a sizable contribution to the antideuteron flux. GAPS is planned to fly on a long-duration balloon over Antarctica in the austral summer of 2020. The primary detector is a 1m3 central volume containing planes of Si(Li) detectors. This volume is surrounded by a time-of-flight system to both trigger the Si(Li) detector and reconstruct the particle tracks. The detection principle of the experiment relies on the identification of the antiparticle annihilation pattern. Low energy antiparticles slow down in the apparatus and they are captured in the medium to form exotic excited atoms, which de-excite by emitting characteristic X-rays. Afterwards they undergo nuclear annihilation, resulting in a star of pions and protons. The simultaneous measurement of the stopping depth and the dE/dx loss of the primary antiparticle, of the X-ray energies and of the star particle-multiplicity provides very high rejection power, that is critical in rare-event search. GAPS will be able to perform a precise measurement of the cosmic antiproton flux below 250 MeV, as well as a sensitive search for antideuterons.
We present a model for the Universe in which quantum anomalies are argued to play an important dual role: they are responsible for generating matter-antimatter asymmetry, but also provide time-dependent contributions to the vacuum energy density of running-vacuum type, which drive the Universe evolution. During the inflationary phase of a string-inspired Universe, and its subsequent exit, the existence of primordial gravitational waves induce gravitational anomalies, which couple to the Kalb-Ramond (KR)axion field of the massless gravitational string multiplet. Such anomalous CP violating interactions have two important effects: first, they lead to contributions to the vacuum energy density of the form appearing in the running vacuum model (RVM) framework, proportional to both the square and the fourth power of the effective Hubble parameter $H$, the $H^4$ terms being associated with anomaly-induced inflation within the RVM framework. Second, there is an undiluted KR axion at the end of inflation, which plays an important role in generating matter-antimatter asymmetry through baryogenesis via leptogenesis in models with heavy right handed neutrinos. As the Universe exits inflation and enters a radiation dominated era, the generation of chiral fermionic matter is responsible for the cancellation of gravitational anomalies, thus restoring diffeomorphism invariance for the matter/radiation (quantum) theory, as required for consistency. Chiral U(1) anomalies may remain uncompensated, though, during matter/radiation dominance, providing RVM-like $H^2$ and $H^4$ contributions to the Universe energy density. Finally, in the current era, gravitational anomalies resurface, leading to much weaker RVM-like $H_0^2$ contributions to the vacuum energy density.Our model favours axionic Dark Matter,the source of which can be the KR axion.
Antimatter macroscopic dark matter (macros) refers to a generic class of antimatter dark matter candidates that interact with ordinary matter primarily through annihilation with large cross-sections. A combination of terrestrial, astrophysical, and cosmological observations constrain a portion of the anti-macro parameter space. However, a large region of the parameter space remains unconstrained, most notably for nuclear-dense objects.