Quark Matter’S Connection With The Higgs: Heavy Ion Collisions Delve Deeper Into The Origin Of (Visible) Mass

ou may think you've heard everything you need to know about the origin of mass. After all, scientists colliding protons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe recently presented stunning evidence strongly suggesting the existence of a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson, thought to "impart mass to matter." But while the Higgs particle may be responsible for the mass of fundamental particles such as quarks, quarks alone can't account for the mass of most of the visible matter in the universe -- that's everything we see and sense around us.  
 
 
 
To get a grasp on what holds these visible forms of matter together -- everything from stars to planets to people -- you have to understand how quarks and gluons interact. That's the essence of quark matter physics -- and the Quark Matter 2012 international conference, taking place in Washington, D.C., August 12-18.
"We're studying the 99 percent of the mass of the visible universe that isn't explained by the Higgs," says Peter Steinberg, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and a keen participant in the Quark Matter conference.
Visible matter, he explains, is everything made of atoms, which get their mass mainly from the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. The electrons orbiting around the nucleus contribute practically nothing. But the protons and neutrons, each made of three quarks, are much more massive than the sum of their constituent particles. Where does all the "extra" mass come from?
The answer, physicists believe, lies in how the quarks interact via the exchange of gluons, massless particles that hold the quarks together via nature's strongest force, and interactions among the gluons themselves. To tease apart the features of this force, which gets stronger and stronger if you try to pull the subatomic quarks apart, physicists accelerate atomic nuclei (a.k.a. heavy ions) to near light speed, where the gluons become dominant, and then steer them into head-on collisions at particle accelerators like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. These collisions recreate conditions that last existed early in the universe, before quarks joined up to form protons and neutrons. Studying the behavior of "free" quarks and gluons in this primordial quark-gluon plasma should help scientists better understand the strong force, and how it generates so much of the mass we see when the particles coalesce to form ordinary matter.
So, while visible matter accounts for a mere fraction of the total universe -- just five percent, the rest being composed of dark matter and mysterious dark energy -- it's enough to keep physicists like Steinberg busy for a while!
 

The three valence quarks that make up each proton account for about one percent of its mass; the rest comes from interactions among the quarks and gluons.
Credit: Image courtesy of Brookhaven National Laboratory

 

 
 This is only one branch of science, but yes, cosmology and QM combined are on the way to understanding what took place in the BB. There are already feasible theories, some with good evidence, that indicate the existence of the multiverse and preconditions before the BB.
 
Define the 'unknown'?
 
MelT

 

 
The space outside our universe and before it is not empty or nothingness, but is believed to contain energy (Google 'scalar field') and other universes. In one model of the BB, we are the result of two other 'branes'/universes colliding.
 
The following is weighted towards String theory, but is valid in many respects:
 

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Inflationary universe?
   Matter and radiation are gravitationally attractive, so in a maximally symmetric spacetime filled with matter, the gravitational force will inevitably cause any lumpiness in the matter to grow and condense. That's how hydrogen gas turned into galaxies and stars. But vacuum energy comes with a high vacuum pressure, and that high vacuum pressure resists gravitational collapse as a kind of repulsive gravitational force. The pressure of the vacuum energy flattens out the lumpiness, and makes space get flatter, not lumpier, as it expands.
   So one possible solution to the flatness problem would be if our Universe went through a phase where the only energy density present was a uniform vacuum energy. If this phase occurred before the radiation-dominated era, then the Universe could evolve to be extraordinarily flat when the radiation-dominated era began, so extraordinarily flat that the lumpy evolution of the radiation- and matter-dominated periods would be consistent with the high degree of remaining flatness that is observed today.
   This type of solution to the flatness problem was proposed in the 1980s by cosmologist Alan Guth. The model is called the Inflationary Universe. In the Inflation model, our Universe starts out as a rapidly expanding bubble of pure vacuum energy, with no matter or radiation. After a period of rapid expansion, or inflation, and rapid cooling, the potential energy in the vacuum is converted through particle physics processes into the kinetic energy of matter and radiation. The Universe heats up again and we get the standard Big Bang.
   So an inflationary phase before the Big Bang could explain how the Big Bang started with such extraordinary spatial flatness that it is still so close to being flat today.
   Inflationary models also solve the horizon problem. The vacuum pressure accelerates the expansion of space in time so that a photon can traverse much more of space than it could in a spacetime filled with matter. To put it another way, the attractive force of matter on light in some sense slows the light down by slowing down the expansion of space itself. In an inflationary phase, the expansion of space is accelerated by vacuum pressure from the cosmological constant, and light gets farther faster because space is expanding faster.
   If there were an inflationary phase of our Universe before the radiation-dominated era of the Big Bang, then by the end of the inflationary period, light could have crossed the whole Universe. And so the isotropy of the radiation from the Big Bang would no longer be inconsistent with the finiteness of the speed of light.
   The inflationary model also solves the magnetic monopole problem, because in the particle physics that underlies the inflationary idea, there would only be one magnetic monopole per vacuum energy bubble. That means only one magnetic monopole per Universe.
   That's why the inflationary universe theory is still the favored pre-Big Bang cosmology among cosmologists...."
 
MelT

 

 
No. The singularity (the 'condensed matter) was the Universe at that point, existing within a scalar field with other universes and fledglings if the multiverse theory is correct. If you think of it in terms of being pre-matter to some extent, with different types of elements condensing out of it as it expanded. This is very, very simplistic though...
 
"...The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model for the early development of the universe.^[1] According to the theory, the Big Bang occurred approximately 13.82 billion years ago, which is thus considered the age of the universe.^[2] At this time, the universe was in an extremely hot and dense state and was expanding rapidly. After the initial expansion, the universe cooled sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles, including protons, neutrons, and electrons. Though simple atomic nuclei formed within the first three minutes after the Big Bang, thousands of years passed before the first electrically neutral atoms formed. The majority of atoms that were produced by the Big Bang are hydrogen, along with helium and traces of lithium. Giant clouds of these primordial elements later coalesced through gravity to form stars and galaxies, and the heavier elements were synthesized either within stars or during supernovae...."
 
MelT

 

 
No, 'space' had dimensions (some in other Universes, if the Mutliverse option is true), many were coiled up inside each other, or were tiny.
 
A good intro' to the idea of dimensions:
 
2...
Imagine the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world, something like Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland. In this land, there is no such thing as height; all of the universe is contained in the plane, and there are only two directions of motion: forward or backward, left or right. Suppose the inhabitants of this world discover that there are regions in their space where it is more difficult to move than others. Furthermore, they discover that each object creates such a region, with a size proportional to its mass. They find, therefore, that when two objects are close together, it is harder for them to move apart then if they are separated by a great distance, as if they are attracted to one another. How could the residents of this land explain such a thing? They might say that there is a mysterious attractive "force" which acts upon all things in their universe. They would probably make up long equations and laws to describe and predict the consequences of this "force." They might even give it a name, say... "gravity." But have they really explained anything?
Now imagine that, one day as you descend into your basement, you come across this flat world. You see thousands of little creatures moving about, bumping into one another, and otherwise carrying on. Curious, you poke your finger down into this world, creating a deep depression. From all directions, the little people fall helplessly into the well you have created, screaming that a giant planet (your finger, which to them appears as a circle) has appeared and is sucking them all in with its immense gravitational force. From your perspective in the third dimension, however, there is no mysterious force. The little people are merely experiencing the effects of curved space. It is more difficult to move in a curved region in space, as anyone who has climbed College Hill knows.
Now, stretch your imagination to suppose that our own four-dimensional universe is likewise curved. Gravity would, as for the flat-world residents, be merely the effects of curved space. Albert Einstein imagined a world precisely this way, and in 1916 published his theory of General Relativity, which proposes that space-time is warped and curved by matter, which appears to us as gravity.
Building upon Einstein's work, physicists began to question whether we might be just like the Flatlanders, living in a universe of many dimensions, but aware of only a few. They began to discover that, by allowing their theories to include more and more dimensions, they could account for all observable forces. The most popular of these theories, called Hyperspace theory, requires a ten-dimensional universe.
Of course, there is no definite way to know exactly how many dimensions our universe has. Like the Flatlanders, we can only find hints of what lies beyond our four-dimensional perception. Our universe may be contained within a reality of thousands of dimensions, or of infinite dimensions. Unless those dimensions interact with our four (or ten) in specific ways, there is no way that we can detect them. Not until their inhabits come to visit, anyway!.."
 
Melt