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Physicists Propose Early-Universe Cosmic Knots to Explain Matter–Antimatter Imbalance

A peer-reviewed model in Physical Review Letters describes metastable topological solitons collapsing via quantum tunneling to seed heavy neutrinos that drive baryogenesis.

Overview

  • The framework combines gauged B–L symmetry with a global Peccei–Quinn symmetry, yielding flux-tube strings and superfluid vortices that lock into long-lived knot solitons.
  • These objects behave like matter as the Universe expands, briefly dominating the energy density before decaying through quantum tunneling.
  • Collapse produces heavy right-handed neutrinos whose out-of-equilibrium decays generate a small excess of matter over antimatter.
  • Model calculations point to reheating near 100 GeV, a scale that enables electroweak processes to convert a lepton asymmetry into baryons.
  • The authors predict a shifted, higher-frequency gravitational-wave background that future observatories such as LISA, Cosmic Explorer and DECIGO could test, while stressing the idea remains theoretical and needs further simulations.