Scientific American reports:

Why is there something rather than nothing? Philosopher Martin Heidegger called this “the first of all questions,” and it has vexed scholars and theologians alike throughout history.

Science has yet to find an answer, either—but researchers have narrowed it down. What’s clear is that the big bang churned out infinitesimally more baryonic matter—the protons and neutrons that glom together as atomic nuclei—than it did antimatter. This is strange because matter and antimatter annihilate each other when they interact—and today whenever physicists turn energy into particles, antiparticle doppelgangers emerge in equal numbers. So, all things being equal, matter and antimatter in the hot, dense primordial universe should have reacted together to simply poof out of existence. Total annihilation would be the norm—and we shouldn’t be here. Somehow, though, this process instead left behind a miniscule excess of matter, forged in the first split second of time, which became the source of essentially everything we’re made of and all that we can see.

Physicists have now found a new clue about the source of this mismatch by studying quarks and gluons—the building blocks of baryonic matter. Nature, it seems, is set askew not through either quarks or gluons alone but via their intermingling. The research, which appears today in Science, used the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. (RHIC was permanently shuttered earlier this year to make way for a new, better particle collider at Brookhaven.)

“This is one of the most significant results achieved by the RHIC program,” says Dmitri Kharzeev, a physicist at Stony Brook University, who was not involved with the new paper but is mentioned in its acknowledgments. “It reshapes our understanding of baryon structure and how baryonic matter emerged.” [Continue reading…]