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“Mirror of the Universe” moves back in time and may be the key to the puzzle!

Amman Today

publish date 2022-03-18 09:48:34

Our world may have a mirror – an anti-universe isotope stretching back in time from the Big Bang that may solve the mystery of the universe’s “missing” dark matter, physicists claim.

Physicists determined that the laws of nature tend to follow three basic symmetries: charge, parity, and time, collectively known as CPT symmetry. So what that means, in theory, is that if you think about interactions between any particles, you can reverse charges (switching matter for antimatter, for example); replacing every particle, reaction, and decay with a mirror image (the so-called valence shift); Or run the interaction backward instead of forward in time – and it will still behave the same way. But in reality, things are a little more complicated, with individual symmetries sometimes not being followed, in what physicists call “violation”.

If we take neutrinos, for example – subatomic particles that look like electrons, but with no electric charge and little mass – they are thought to always rotate clockwise relative to the direction in which they are traveling.

Physicists call this the “left”. If you extend your hand with your thumb pointing toward you and your fingers bent, you will see that your fingers turn around the axis of your thumb in a clockwise direction.

And since all known neutrinos are left-handed, you can’t perform the parity transformation on them, since the inverse would be a right-handed neutrino, which appears to be nonexistent.

Likewise, since antineutrinos are always right-handed, you can’t perform a charge transfer on a neutrino, since you’d have to end up with a left-handed antineutrino.

While single symmetry has been seen to be violated, no system has ever violated all three parts of CPT symmetry simultaneously – it appears to be fundamental.

In their study, Dr. Latham Boyle and colleagues at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, proposed extending the range of CPT symmetry.

They set out to explore whether it could be applied not only to basic interactions within the universe, but also to the universe itself.

According to the trio, the starting point for this thought experiment came from a “simple observation” – that in the hot, radiation-dominated era of the early universe that began less than a minute after the Big Bang, the mathematics describing the background of the universe has a time-reversal symmetry.

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“We interpret this as evidence that the state of the universe (i.e. space-time itself as well as the quantum state of quantum field theory in that space-time) may in fact respect CPT symmetry,” they added.

In order to apply CPT symmetry to the universe, it stands to reason that our understanding of the universe can only be half the picture – and there must be another universe on the other side of the Big Bang, where time passes.

In this “mirror” universe, all particles will have the opposite charge to their counterparts in the main universe, as if they were upside down in the mirror and running, from our perspective, “backwards” in time.

While both our universe or the mirror universe violate the CPT symmetry, when taken together as a couple, they obey it.

“The universe before the explosion and the universe after the explosion may be viewed as a universe/anti-universe pair, emanating directly in the radiation-dominated hot era that we observe in our past,” the team said. And looking at our known universe as part of a universe/anti-universe pair has some interesting ramifications for our understanding of physics.

First, the researchers showed that a universe respecting CPT would naturally expand and fill itself with particles.

This relieves the need for the so-called “inflationary epoch” in which the universe rapidly expanded for a fraction of a second shortly after the big bang, increasing its size by a factor of a trillion – or “1” followed by 78 zeros.

While there is plenty of evidence to suggest an inflationary event has indeed occurred, models for such all have inherent volatility – and other explanations may still be applicable.

Meanwhile, a CPT-respecting universe would need one type of massless neutrino plus at least one type of right-handed neutrino – which, as we noted earlier, has never been observed.

Physicists believe that if the right neutrinos did exist, they would be abundant but largely undetectable and interact with other particles only by gravity.

This makes right-handed neutrinos an intriguing candidate for “dark matter”, the mysterious component of the universe whose existence – and its gravitational influence – needs to fully explain the motion of stars within galaxies.

Physicists have estimated that about 27 percent of the universe may consist of dark matter.

However, the researchers explained, there are ways we can infer the existence of a realistic mirror world by studying the properties of our universe.

For example, if our universe has a twin, we will have to discover someday that all currently known neutrinos are their antiparticles – and as we mentioned earlier, one type of neutrino is completely massless.

Finally, the double-universe model would mean that space-time has never been shaken by inflation, which means that a constant search for primordial gravitational waves – such as the one conducted by BICEP at the South Pole – would be futile.

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Source : اخبار الاردن

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