The Big Bang should have created matter and antimatter in equal amounts. So why isn’t the universe 50% antimatter? When a matter particle meets its antiparticle, they annihilate, disappears in a flash of energy.
During the first fractions of a second of the Big Bang, the hot, dense Universe was fizzing with particle-antiparticle pairs popping in and out of existence. Without some other, unknown mechanism at play, the Universe should contain nothing but excess energy.
According to the Standard Model, beauty quarks should decay into equal numbers of electron and muon particles. Instead, the process yields more electrons than muons.
An as-yet-unverified particle known as a leptoquark was involved in the decay process and made it easier to produce electrons. Leptoquarks provide the difference in how beauty quarks decay to create electrons or muons. Leptoquarks (LQs) are hypothetical particles that would interact with quarks and leptons. Leptoquarks are color-triplet bosons that carry both lepton and baryon numbers. Other quantum numbers, like spin, (fractional) electric charge, and weak isospin, vary among theories.
According to the Standard Model, beauty quarks should decay into equal numbers of electron and muon particles. Instead, the process yields more electrons than muons. A yet-to-be-verified new fundamental particle or force that interacts differently with these particles has been discovered.
