Our universe may have been the only one to survive in a supposed multiverse after the Big Bang, and that would explain one of the biggest mysteries about the Higgs boson: its mass. At least that’s what a new study, published by researchers at CERN, suggests, where the Higgs particle was discovered in 2012.
When the Higgs boson was found at the Large Hadron Collider, the particle accelerator at CERN, scientists were as surprised as they were elated. It is that, although the discovery was a fundamental milestone for particle physics, its mass is much lighter than anticipated.
It is not yet known why the mass is not the same as the theory predicted before the discovery, but there are some hypotheses that try to solve the problem. The most recent one deals with multiverses and something called the “Strong CP Problem”.
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Higgs Boson and Multiverse
The study authors proposed a model that initiates the Big Bang by generating an infinity of universes, each with a different mass for the Higgs boson. In some of them, the particle would be quite heavy, and in others, light.
Then, physicists calculated how these universes would evolve over time, and found that universes with heavier Higgs bosons became unstable and collapsed in a fraction of a second. The lighter Higgs particles survived — and perhaps our universe was the only one left.
Interestingly, this also brought up a hypothetical solution to another problem, related to the strong force, which links quarks and gluons to form protons and neutrons. The theory of quantum chromodynamics describes that the strong force would not need to present something known as a CP system.
Strong CP problem
CP symmetry states that the universe would remain the same if particles were “mirrored” and exchanged for their antiparticles. In other words, the laws of physics would be the same when replacing positively charged particles with negatively charged particles.
This theory is broken in the Standard Model through weak interactions, but it is also expected to be broken through strong interactions governing quantum chromodynamics, but this has not yet been observed.
Currently, quantum chromodynamics shows that a violation of CP symmetry could perfectly well occur in strong interactions, but none has been found in any experiments involving the strong force, and we still don’t know why. This is a type of fine-tuning problem.
There are some proposed explanations for the strong CP problem, but none of them has yet been proven. The curious thing is that the model of multiverses with Higgs bosons with different masses for each universe solves this question.
The authors found that strong symmetric interactionswhich obey symmetry of charge and polarity even without any compelling forcescontribute to preventing a collapse. That is, a universe that, by mere chance, presents a combination of a light Higgs boson and CP symmetry in the strong force, is more likely to survive.
This means that both the mass of the Higgs particle and the CP symmetry do not necessarily follow a more fundamental law, but occur “randomly” in one of the many universes that have arisen. And, precisely because of these properties, our cosmos may have been the only one to survive.
It’s all just a hypothesisvery tempting, by the way. But new experiments need to be carried out on instruments like the Large Hadron Collider. The team predicts that this should happen later this year.
The new article was published in Physical Review Letters.
