“If this result is real, someone will get a Nobel Prize,” said Marc Kamionkowski, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved in the analysis. As if playing a cosmic game of Connect the Dots, the researchers drew lines between groups of four galaxies, making four-cornered shapes called tetrahedra. When they constructed every possible tetrahedron from a catalog of 1 million galaxies, they found that tetrahedra with one-way orientation outperformed their mirror images. A hint of the imbalance between tetrahedra and mirror images was first reported by Oliver Philcox, an astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York, in a paper published in Physical Review D in September. In an independent analysis conducted simultaneously and now undergoing peer review, Jiamin Hou and Zachary Slepian of the University of Florida and Robert Cahn of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory identified the asymmetry with a level of statistical certainty that physicists usually consider conclusive. But with such a blockbuster finding — and one that’s still under review — experts say caution is warranted. “There’s no obvious reason they were wrong,” said Shaun Hotchkiss, a cosmologist at the University of Auckland. “That doesn’t mean there isn’t a mistake.” The alleged imbalance violates a symmetry called “parity,” an equivalence of left and right. If the observation holds up to scrutiny, physicists believe it must reflect an unknown parity-breaking component in the primordial process that sowed the seeds of all the structure that developed in our universe. “It’s an incredible result — really impressive,” Kamionkowski said. “I believe that; I’ll be waiting to really celebrate.”

Left Hand Universe

Parity was once a favorite symmetry of physics. But then, in 1957, the nuclear decay experiments of Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu revealed that our universe does indeed have a slight sensitivity: The subatomic particles involved in the weak nuclear force, which causes nuclear fission, are always magnetically oriented in the opposite direction . direction from that in which they move, so that they twist like the threads of a counter-clockwise screw. Mirror particles—those like clockwise screws—don’t feel the weak force. Wu’s revelation was shocking. “We are all rather shocked by the death of our dear friend, parity,” wrote physicist John Blatt in a letter to Wolfgang Pauli. The left-hander of the weak force has subtle effects that could not have affected the world on a galactic scale. But since Wu’s discovery, physicists have looked for other ways in which the universe differs from its mirror image. If, for example, some primordial parity violation was in place when the universe was in its infancy, it could have captured a twist in the structure of the universe. At or near the time of the birth of the universe, a field known as the inflaton is believed to have permeated space. A flowing, boiling medium where puff particles were constantly bubbling up and disappearing, the puff field was also repulsive. for the short time it may have existed, it would have caused our universe to rapidly expand to 100 trillion trillion times its original size. All these quantum fluctuations of the particles in the inflation field were ejected and frozen in the universe, turning into variations in the density of matter. The denser pockets continued to gravitationally coalesce to produce the galaxies and large-scale structure we see today. In 1999, researchers including Kamionkowski looked at what would happen if there was more than one field before this explosion. The inflaton field could have interacted with another field that could produce right-handed and left-handed particles. If the inflaton treated right-handed particles differently than left-handed ones, then it could have preferentially created one-handed particles over the other. This so-called Chern-Simons coupling would have imbued the early quantum fluctuations with a preferred charge, which would have evolved into an imbalance of left- and right-handed galaxy tetrahedral arrangements. As for what the additional field might be, one possibility is the gravitational field. In this scenario, a parity-violating Chern-Simons interaction would arise between inflaton particles and gravitons—the quantum units of gravity—that would have appeared in the gravitational field during inflation. 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