Meet the ‘bubbletrons’ — theoretical particle accelerators that may have helped build the universe as we know it.
The extremely early universe featured the most cataclysmic, transformative and energetic events that ever occurred. Driving these energies was the expansion of the cosmos and the resulting fragmentation of the fundamental forces of nature.
And in that fragmentation, massive bubbles may have emerged and collided with each other, powering up energies that would put to shame even our most advanced human-made particle accelerators, new research published June 27 on the preprint database arXiv suggests.
Those awesome energies could have flooded the universe with dark matter particles, microscopic black holes, and much more, the researchers wrote. And the name of those ultra-energetic, early universe structures? Meet the «bubbletrons.»Bubbles of chaos
The four fundamental forces of nature — electromagnetism, strong nuclear, weak nuclear and gravity — are not always so different. At high energies, these forces begin to merge. We can already detect this in our most powerful particle colliders, where electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force merge into a united «electroweak» force. While not proven, physicists strongly suspect that at even higher energies the other forces also merge into a single, unified force.
