The other leading theory, called leptogenesis, stems instead from neutrinos. When matter and antimatter come into contact, they annihilate each other, so most of the stuff in the young universe would have been destroyed, leaving behind just a small surplus of matter to make the galaxies and stars and planets around us. If these Higgs cousins exist, they could have helped set off an abrupt phase transition, akin to the shift when water goes from liquid to gas, early in the universe that might have led to slightly more matter than antimatter in space. One, called electroweak baryogenesis, posits extra versions of the Higgs boson-the particle related to how everything else gets mass.
Most of the theories about how matter got the upper hand over antimatter fall into two main camps. Whatever the final answer is, resolving the question may tell us more than just why we live in a universe of matter-it could expose secrets from the earliest epochs of the cosmos or even connect us to the invisible dark matter that eludes scientists. Last week scientists announced tantalizing findings that point toward one possible solution, but the data fall short of a definitive discovery. For decades theorists have come up with potential solutions, most involving the existence of extra particles beyond the known species in the universe.
Why? This question is one of the defining mysteries of physics. In the beginning, there was matter and antimatter, and then there was only matter.
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