5 mysteries the particle could solve
Though hypothetical, the axiflavon promises to solve five of the biggest mysteries in modern physics and cosmology
The cause of inflation
The modern Big Bang theory requires inflation – a burst of sudden expansion just after the moment of creation in order to ‘smooth out’ the raw material of the universe and give rise to the distribution of matter we see today – but how did inflation work? One theory involves a hypothetical ‘inflation field’, giving rise to inflation particles whose properties could also match those of the axiflavon. As inflation came to an end and the universe continued to cool, these particles decayed in the lower energy conditions to produce today’s matter particles.
What is dark matter?
All of the universe’s visible material, from stars and galaxies to interstellar gas and dust clouds, accounts for just one-sixth of its overall mass – the rest, revealed only through the influence of its gravity, is not just dark, but invisible and transparent. Evidence suggests that dark matter consists of unknown particles that cluster loosely around concentrations of visible matter such as galaxies – axiflavons, if their existence is proven, could have just the properties required for a dark matter candidate.
The Higgs boson mass mystery
First proposed in 1964 and discovered at the Large Hadron Collider in 2012, the Higgs boson confirms the existence of the mass-producing Higgs field and completes the Standard Model of particle physics. But why does this particle apparently weigh so much less than it should? Axiflavon-Higgs unification suggests that the mystery could be explained if the Higgs is just one aspect of a multi-purpose particle.
The ‘reversed’ universe
For physicists, symmetry is the question of whether a process or interaction is symmetric and involves looking at how it behaves when certain properties are reversed. The axion field and particle were invented to explain why strong-force interactions, against expectation, maintain charge-parity symmetry. Confirmation of an axiflavon capable of displaying axion-like properties in certain situations would resolve the strong CP problem for once and for all.
The quark flavour problem
Quark particles come in six distinct ‘flavours’ – the common up and down quarks found in everyday matter, and the exotic strange, charm, top and bottom quarks. In theory quarks should be able to change flavour through the weak interaction, but the huge differences between different flavours complicate the question. The hypothetical flavon field resolves the problem using namesake particles to give the quarks different amounts of ‘drag’ through the massproducing Higgs field. Axiflavons are ideal particles for controlling these interactions.
“We found that the flavon and the axion could be realised together as two components of a single ‘complex’ scalar field” dr Florian Goertz