Everything in the universe consists of matter and not antimatter, but why is a mystery. Nikhef theorist Marieke Postma is receiving NWO funding for her research into this asymmetry, which must have arisen just after the Big Bang.
NWO is awarding funding to a total of 21 innovative and fundamental research proposals in the so-called Open Competition. This was announced in The Hague. Postma will receive an ENW-M1 grant to appoint a new PhD student.
The universe began some 14 billion years ago. Postma, affiliated with Nikhef and Radboud University Nijmegen, is investigating theoretical scenarios of what happened after the Big Bang, and how our current universe formed. Important moments are the phase transitions in which the properties of matter suddenly change.
In the standard model, particles and antiparticles have nearly identical properties. When they meet, they annihilate each other and only light remains. So new physics is needed to explain a matter-only universe.
Postma wants to investigate whether matter particles gained the upper hand during the so-called electroweak phase transition: the moment elementary particles gained mass via the Higgs mechanism.
This idea, Postma says, is now ripe for further investigation. “With new techniques and methods, we can calculate the phase transition itself a lot more precisely than we could a decade ago, and there are much better experimental data to test the theory on.” On top of that, she says, there is also renewed interest in cosmic phase transitions from research into gravitational waves.
Postma hopes to begin the research project starting in the new academic year.
More information: news release NWO