NEW YORK : Study by a team of European physicists might explain why the world did not demolished instantly after the Big Bang. Studies of the Higgs element proposed that the very early accelerating universe should have been unbalanced – and scientists have been trying to work out why this was not the case.
But this latest study suggests that the Higgs boson may have actually interacted in gravity in such a way that enabled the universe to survive.
Physicists from Imperial College London and the Universities of Copenhagen and Helsinki believe this simple explanation could explain the beginning of the universe.
In the new study in Physical Review Letters, the team describes how the spacetime curvature – in effect, gravity – provided the stability needed for the universe to survive expansion in that early period 13.8 billion years ago. The team investigated the interaction between the Higgs particles and gravity, taking into account how it would vary with energy.
And they showed that even a small interaction would have been enough to stabilise the universe against decay.
It was thought that, under current models of physics, Higgs particles would have been created in abundance in the early universe and caused instability, ultimately leading to its demise.
But the researchers found that, at high levels of gravity not possible to recreate in the present day on Earth, gravitational fields actually prevented the production of these Higgs particles.
Professor Arttu Rajantie, from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London who was part of the study, told MailOnline this means that our current models of physics are capable of explaining this instability in the early universe – whereas previously they had been thought to be inadequate.
This is because they predict that the production of Higgs particles should cause the universe to collapse.
But Professor Rajantie’s study suggests that under our current Standard Model of physics, gravity would actually have come to the rescue and prevented them from forming.
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