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OP-EDSTUESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2020

Are we finally on the verge of discovering why we arehere?

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BY GRAHAM WHITE | SPECIAL TO THE DAILY CAL
Why are we here? This is one of the questions that has fascinatedphilosophers and scientists alike. Physicists have madeastonishing progress in combining knowledge from different
fields to reverse engineer how the universe evolved into thedynamic world of matter we see around us. Recently, thisprogress has stumbled upon an unexpected puzzle: Why do weonly see a world of matter?
We have known for nearly a century that another type ofsubstance exists: antimatter. This mysterious substance looks
exactly like matter, only it explodes when it is in contact withmatter. In fact, if I met my anti-self, he would look the same until
we shook hands. At that point there would be an explosion that

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STREAMING DIARIES‘Community,’ a bright light inwould release the equivalent energy of a billion tons of exploding
TNT or eating a trillion tons of sugar! The puzzle of the lack ofantimatter has become more existential over the last few decades
as we have learned more about what we are made of and what theworld looked like seconds after its birth.
Everything we know says that matter and antimatter should beproduced in equal amounts. Yet we can tell, by observing lightfrom a million years after the universe was born, that for every 10billion antiparticles produced in the primordial soup, 10 billion
and one particles were produced. This difference, this slight
imbalance, may seem small, but it was enough of a difference tosave us from complete annihilation. In modern cosmology, thequestion of “Where is all the antimatter?” has become equivalent
to “Why are we here?” So far, nothing in our knowledge providesan answer!

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At this point, one might appeal to divine intervention — maybe
God just said, “Let there be 10 billion and one particles for every
Cruising around Santa Catalina
10 billion antiparticles!” But there would be a catch — we know
Island: What to see and how tosee itthat before such a difference between matter and antimatter
existed, there was almost certainly a period when the universe
violently and rapidly expanded, diluting just about every feature of the universe to nonexistence.
This period is known as “inflation,” and it is a giant cosmic eraser. Even if a divine command wasuttered, it was undone a fraction of a second later! Our very existence proves that there must be newlaws of physics waiting to be discovered.
This amazing puzzle has inspired scientists all over the world. We know of many possible answers tothis baffling question, but two main ideas have attracted the most attention. The first idea postulates
that when the universe was about a billion times hotter than the center of the Earth, it started toboil. Bubbles formed, and inside these bubbles, both particles and antiparticles had a mass, whereas
outside they were massless. The particles and antiparticles had slightly different chances of passing
through the bubble wall, and a tiny difference between matter and antimatter was created.
The second idea involves the lightest particles in the universe, neutrinos, which are a billion times
lighter than an electron. This idea theorizes that neutrinos have heavy friends known as steriles.
These neutrinolike particles that spin in the opposite direction were initially proposed as thesimplest way to explain how neutrinos have a mass at all. It was found that if these steriles exist,
however, they like to decay into antineutrinos slightly more often than neutrinos.
Until now, physicists have believed that the first explanation was testable, while the second was not.
A giant machine in Switzerland known as the Large Hadron Collider is testing whether the physics
needed to make the universe boil really exists. The steriles, on the other hand, have to be at least amillion times heavier than anything that can be produced at the Large Hadron Collider.
But the game changed with the discovery of gravitational waves. The universe is no longer seethrough to light when we try to look earlier than its millionth birthday — an impenetrable veil iscreated by the extreme density and heat of the old universe. Yet, the universe is completelytransparent to gravitational waves, right back to when the universe was hot enough for these steriles
to be common and ensuring our safety from complete annihilation.
Scientists from Berkeley, Japan and Vancouver, Canada (including myself) have shown that thesesteriles can produce a bunch of tiny tubes where they have no mass, known as “cosmic strings.”
When this network of strings tries to simplify itself, it produces ripples of gravitational waves. Thesize of these ripples are big enough to be seen today for the entire range of masses these steriles canhave! Most exciting of all, we have shown that one does not have to be lucky for us to see theseripples — they are consistent across space-time.
We categorized all the ways in which the steriles can get a mass and more than half of these ways
produced ripples. We also predicted the range in size that these ripples can have, using the fact thatthe steriles have to have specific properties to explain our existence.
The world is now in a competition to see gravitational waves in many different ways through manydifferent experiments. This race involves the U.S., Europe, China and Japan as major players thathave all proposed exciting experiments, and some experiments even have funding and launch dates.
We, therefore, compared the sensitivity of proposed experiments that search for gravitational waves

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with the ripples produced when we were saved from complete annihilation. Between all of theseinternational efforts, nearly the entire range of masses that these steriles can have can be seen overthe next few decades.
It is, therefore, more likely than not that these ripples truly exist and will be detectable by proposed
experiments. In other words, we would have to be bitterly unlucky to not find the answer to why weare here within our lifetime! The range of time that it will take for these experimental results tocome through is a couple of decades. It is the perfect time for those thinking about starting a careerin physics to join in on finding the answer to the millennial-old question of how we got here.

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