Based on the discovery of the Higgs boson and the recent results from the BICEP2 collaboration, UK physicists have made a surprising prediction: the Universe should not have lasted for more than a second.
The tiny temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background, shown here as color, trace primordial density fluctuations in the early universe that seed the later growth of galaxies. Gravitational waves from inflation are expected to produce much a fainter pattern that includes twisting B-mode polarization, consistent with the B-mode polarization pattern observed by BICEP2, which is shown here as black lines. The line segments show the polarization strength and orientation at different spots on the sky. Image credit: BICEP2 Collaboration.
After the Universe began in the Big Bang, it is thought to have gone through an explosive period of growth known as cosmic inflation.
Although the details of this process are not yet fully understood, scientists have been able to make predictions of how this would affect the modern Universe.
In a 2014 study, BICEP2 collaboration claimed to have found the first direct evidence that gravitational waves rippled through the infant Universe during cosmic inflation. If true, this result is a major advance in our understanding of cosmology and a confirmation of the inflation theory, but they have proven controversial and are not yet fully accepted by cosmologists.
In the new study, Robert Hogan and Dr Malcolm Fairbairn, both from King’s College London in UK, have investigated what the BICEP2 results mean for the stability of the Universe.
They combined the results with recent advances in particle physics. Measurements of the recently detected Higgs boson have allowed physicists to show that our Universe sits in a valley of the so-called Higgs Field, which describes the way that other particles have mass. However, there is a different valley which is much deeper, but our Universe is preventing from falling into it by a large energy barrier.
The problem is that the BICEP2 results predict that the Universe would have received large ‘kicks’ during the cosmic inflation phase, pushing it into the other valley of the Higgs Field within a fraction of a second.
If that had happened, the Universe would have quickly collapsed in a Big Crunch.
“This is an unacceptable prediction of the theory because if this had happened we wouldn’t be around to discuss it,” said Mr Hogan, who is the second author of the paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
“Perhaps the BICEP2 results contain an error. If not, there must be some other – as yet unknown – process which prevented the Universe from collapsing.”
“If BICEP2 is shown to be correct, it tells us that there has to be interesting new particle physics beyond the Standard Model,” Mr Hogan said.
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Malcolm Fairbairn and Robert Hogan. 2014. Electroweak Vacuum Stability in Light of BICEP2. Phys. Rev. Lett. 112, 201801; doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.112.201801
