Cosmic Foam: How Vacuum Bubbles Created Matter ⚡ экспресс
Collisions of Higgs vacuum bubbles during a first-order phase transition (like boiling, but for the Higgs field) in the early Universe have been studied. These collisions act as a cosmic Higgs collider, reaching energies up to the Planck scale. This opens a unique opportunity to explore new physics and produce superheavy particles: for instance, dark matter with mass up to 10^16 GeV, far beyond the reach of any accelerator. A leptogenesis scenario through the birth of right-handed neutrinos is also possible, explaining the matter-antimatter asymmetry.
Fresh after the Big Bang, the Universe fizzed like a freshly poured soda. All of space was filled with bubbles—regions of new vacuum, the kind governed by the Standard Model, pushing out the old unstable state. The walls of these bubbles accelerated to near light speed, and in head-on collisions they crumpled and burst, unleashing monstrous energy.
These collisions acted as a colossal natural accelerator: at the point of impact, particles of unimaginable mass were born. Among them were candidates for dark matter and hypothetical right-handed neutrinos. The latter, as they decayed, produced a microscopic excess of matter over antimatter—the very imbalance from which galaxies, stars, and we ourselves later formed. This was the one and only time nature switched on such a powerful collider; those conditions never repeated, but we see the results today in the form of galaxies and dark matter.
🎯 Some of the particles born could weigh as much as a grain of salt—an absolute record in the world of elementary particles, since an ordinary proton is billions of billions of times lighter.
🎬 In science fiction, vacuum decay usually appears as a cosmic catastrophe—for example, in Stephen Baxter's novel 'Vacuum Diagrams'. Yet in reality, it is precisely this process that may have given birth to everything that exists.