One of the mysteries of the universe is why it is seems to be made up almost exclusively of matter. The big bang should have produce equal amounts of matter and anti-matter - at least in terms of each class of matter which in this instance would be baryonic matter. But another question has been if there is a similar asymmetry regarding leptons - mainly electrons and neutrinos.
Recent research indicates that in our current universe, the number of anti-leptons exceeds the number of leptons by many orders of magnitude more than baryon asymmetry which is 10^-10. Beyond that, leptons may exceed baryons.
If validated, does this excess of anti-neutrinos have any implications for current cosmology?
One specific thing I had in mind was that it might explain why gravity is so weak. If anti-leptons exert a negative gravitational force AND are more or less evenly distributed throughout the universe, couldn’t that effectively nullify the force gravity would otherwise exert.
At first I thought no, that’s pretty stupid. Maybe if you took huge swaths of the universe it might average out, but as soon as you looked at any concentrations of matter - planets, stars, etc - the amount of baryonic matter there should easily overwhelm the effect.
Although neutrinos technically have mass, it’s so small, to make a comparison to even something like a proton is a huge stretch. Even compared to an electron a neutrino is virtually massless.
Then I remembered something. Virtually all of the mass of a proton comes from its gluons which are technically massless. The mass comes from their constant oscillation between transforming into sea quarks which are matter and anti-matter pairs of the same type of particle and then annihilating one another back to pure energy again.
If anti-matter quarks also exert a negative gravitational force then the net gravitational contribution from the mass of gluons should be zero. If so, then maybe the remaining 1% of mass in the stable quarks might still be effectively nullified in a universe with a huge excess of anti-neutrinos.
Actually I’m still a little doubtful though because even this is probably quite a lot of mass compared to even a huge number of anti-neutrinos. IDK, but I’d love for people to shoot me down and teach me a little more about the mechanics.
Keep in mind that it’s looking increasingly likely that neutrinos might be Majorana particles, meaning that there’s no fundamental difference between particle and antiparticle. This doesn’t entirely solve the problem, of course, but it does reduce it to one of either explaining why so many neutrinos would be cold, or of coming up with a method of producing them other than the weak interaction.