Physicists have long hypothesized the existence of a minuscule particle called the axion that could single-handedly solve two mysteries. It could account for a puzzling property of quarks, the elementary particles inside protons and neutrons, and it could comprise the dark matter that fills the cosmos. Now, the authors of a paper that will be published this week in Physical Review Letters show that the axion could be the rare stone that kills a third bird as well — the question of why there’s so much more matter than antimatter in the universe.
“We found some new dynamics of the axion which produce the matter-antimatter asymmetry,” said Keisuke Harigaya, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, who collaborated on the work with Raymond Co of the University of Michigan.
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