The Tiny Difference that Created the Universe

Roughly 15 billion years ago, during the Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and anti-matter should have been created, with an anti-particle for every particle created. Yet when matter and anti-matter meet, they both disappear in a flash of light, so why didn’t they annihilate each other completely? For some reason, during the first moments of the Big Bang, although lots of matter and anti-matter did meet and annihilate, we were left with a slight surplus of matter, which makes up the Universe today. Whilst grateful for our existence, scientists have been struggling for many years to find an explanation. A new laboratory just completed at the University of Sussex will test one of the possible answers.

The researchers at Sussex believe that the surviving matter must have a special kind of asymmetry in order to explain its survival. They think that the negative charge of the electron must be pushed over to one side instead of being centred. This offset is so tiny, that even if the electron were enlarged to the size of the Earth, the offset would only be the size of an atom. A similar effect is predicted in the neutron where the positive and negative charges within it may also be displaced. It could be thanks to this tiny effect, called an electric dipole moment that the Universe itself exists.

Scientific theory can predict how big this electric dipole moment should be, but to actually look for it, researchers need the latest in low temperature equipment and lasers. The new laboratory, the Centre for the Measurement of Particle Electric Dipole Moments, has been equipped with a £1.7 million award from the Joint Infrastructure Fund and offers the
possibility of a breakthrough in the near future.

Professor Ed Hinds, the director of the new centre, said: “This is a unique and very exciting project. We hope eventually to find out what happened between ‘matter’ and ‘anti-matter’ when the Universe was created.”

Dr Alun Anderson, Editor in Chief of the New Scientist and a Sussex alumnus will open the Centre on May 14th.