Sphere said:
Hello, from what I understood at the very beginning of the universe, the universe was too dense and too hot to allow matter (atoms) to exist, so at the very beginning, the universe was a kind of soup of quarks (components of protons and neutrons). What I was wondering is how quarks appeared in the universe ? How were they created ?
Thank you !
We don't really know.
The earliest point we have good observational confirmation of is Big Bang Nucleosynthesis during which, one protons and neutrons were around, and they formed atoms in roughly the proportions we see today modified by later processes in stars that go supernova and spread around heavier elements. This happens is maybe 15 minutes or an hour (give or take, I'm writing from memory) after the Big Bang in the conventional chronology of the Universe.
Normally, in the Standard Model, when pure energy, such as photons gives rise to photo production of quarks, it creates equal numbers of antiquarks, which would end up annihilating and that leaves you nowhere.
If you just extrapolate the Standard Model as we know it back to the Big Bang, you get a large positive baryon number (baryon number means quarks minus antiquarks, divided by three) for the universe as a whole at the moment of the Big Bang, because the only process that can change the aggregate baryon number of the universe in the Standard Model, which is called a sphaleron process that only takes place at extremely high energies, wouldn't create enough quarks fast enough, from a starting point of zero, to produce the number of quarks that we see today by Big Bang Nucleosynthesis, at which point the quarks had to be there.
So, either there are new physics at high energies, or particular to the early moments of the universe (in either case, that can't be deducted from the Standard Model), or the quarks we already there at t=0 of the Big Bang.
There are a variety of theories out there to explain where quarks comes from with beyond the Standard Model physics, but while science inspired, they are ultimately just untested speculation.
Previous Physics Forums discussion of the issue can be found
here.
For what it is worth, I have a favorite theory (along the lines of
this paper), but really there is no more concrete evidence for it than any other theory regarding this question. I like that particular theory because it is minimalist in its need for new physics.