Heaviest decoupled right-handed neutrino may explain matter-antimatter asymmetry
404 Media · rss · 2026-10-20
A new Physical Review Letters study by Rishav Roshan (University of Southampton) and Sudipta Show (IIT Kanpur) argues the heaviest decoupled right-handed neutrino (RHN)—long overlooked because it barely interacts with matter—is key to why matter dominates the universe.
- The puzzle: equal matter and antimatter should have formed after the Big Bang and annihilated, yet matter prevailed.
- Mechanism: once the early universe cooled below the heavy neutrino's mass energy, it behaved like matter, altering cosmic expansion and its slow decay created a lepton imbalance amplified into the matter-antimatter asymmetry (leptogenesis).
- Testable: next-generation gravitational-wave observatories (SKA, LISA, DECIGO, ET) in the 2030s-40s could detect spectral signatures in primordial gravitational waves.
- Confirmation could refine the Standard Model and inform dark matter and early-universe research.
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