Polish and Norwegian physicists have recreated the Big Bang at the microscopic scale. They’re casting dark matter

The Polish-Norwegian project pursues five research goals, including studying the production of sphalerons and small black holes at the LHC, searching for new sources of CP symmetry violation, for example in the decay of the Higgs boson, or the problem of the electroweak phase transition mechanism. Tools such as machine learning algorithms are used for the analysis, informs the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw (FUW).

The mysteries of the universe under the microscope of scientists

“There are issues that the Standard Model does not explain: one of them is the mystery of so-called dark matter. Particles that we know make up only 5 percent of matter Universe. What is all the rest, ie. Dark matter and dark energy? give an answer to that A question It will be a real revolution in physics, ”- says Professor Stefan Pokorski, quoting the press release, who in his research examines the most fundamental laws governing the evolution of the universe.

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Another mystery is the formation of excess matter. At first, matter and antimatter existed in equal amounts, but later, as a result of the asymmetry of interactions in the annihilation of matter and antimatter, the observed excess of matter remained. Scientists are wondering why this happens and are looking for “candidates” for dark matter.

Theoretical physicists propose various theories that need to be validated experimentally. A collaboration between theory and experience is essential – made possible, as emphasized in the FUW press release, thanks to the grant obtained as part of the GRIEG competition for research projects jointly implemented by research teams from Poland and Norway.

“Casting” of dark matter

partner Scientists FUW under the direction of prof. Stefan Pokorski is the team prof. Anna Lipnyaka of the Department of Physics and technology University of Bergen. Researchers are looking for dark matter.

The Large Hadron Collider allows you to ‘recreate’ phenomena that occurred in the very early universe, and the energies generated there – in a row Even 13 teraelectronvolts (TeV) correspond to the energies of particles in the Universe a billionth of a second after the Big Bang “- explained Professor Pokorski.

Whether to look for Dark Matter to appear earlier in history Universe? According to the professor, this is not possible at the moment, because it is impossible to increase the energy produced at the LHC. However, it is possible to increase the accuracy of the measurements at current energies, that is, to analyze the data from the LHC detectors more accurately. Physicists hope that such procedures will allow them to capture the phenomena that have so far caught their eye. They note that the LHC’s detectors record billions of collisions per second, but only a portion of those measurements are recorded and subjected to further analysis.

As stated by A.D. Pokorski, the universe is about 13.6 billion years old, but knowledge of its early origins is still incomplete. Immediately after the Big Bang, the universe was much smaller and hotter than it is today. It was filled with a trillion-degree plasma of elementary particles. As a result of the cooling and expansion of the universe, protons and neutrons began to form from this “hot soup”, from quarks and gluons, which began to combine into atomic nuclei, the so-called process of nucleosynthesis. Over time, electrons began to gather around the nuclei, and this is how atoms were formed.

Modern physics has given a description of the phenomena that occurred in the early universe one second after the so-called Big Bang. In the 1970s, the theory of elementary interactions was created, the Standard Model, which was confirmed over the next three decades in experiments conducted at so-called particle accelerators, including the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva.

The world’s most powerful accelerator, located in a circular tunnel 100 meters underground, consists of a 27-kilometer ring of superconducting magnets with a series of accelerating structures. Particles moving at close to the speed of light are allowed to collide with each other. The results of the collisions are being recorded by a number of elementary particle detectors, including two large detectors: ATLAS and CMS. The launch of the LHC enabled pioneering feats experiments In physics, for example the discovery of the Higgs boson or the Pentaquarks. However, there are mysteries not yet answered by the experiments conducted at the LHC.

The project “The Early Universe: Theoretical and Accelerated Experiments in Search of a Solution to Its Mysteries” is funded by the Norwegian Financial Mechanism 2014-2021 and is led by the National Science Centre.

The article is taken from PAP – Poland’s science portal

Cole / Beech /