Author: Wanpeng Tan

I share my ideas and thoughts mainly about mirror matter theory and open science on this blog. Under the new theory, we live in the universe with a mirror (hidden) sector of particles. A perfectly imperfect (minimally broken) mirror symmetry is the key to unlock the beauty and elegance of our universe. Click on the menu links for a popular introduction, a technical summary, and list of my papers on the new mirror matter theory.

Open standards for scientific research

Scientific research, by nature, should be open. All knowledge accumulated via generations of scientific research is the common wealth of all human beings and should be shared and passed on for our future endeavors. As such, the practice of open standards in sciences, at least basic sciences, should be in the heart of every scientist.

Unfortunately, many other concerns and issues seem to be diverting sciences from keeping the very nature of openness. Concerns related to national security, intellectual properties, copyrights, and credits, are all valid, yet they should not become barriers to block open access to science.

Here are the list of things, I think, we scientists can do better to make science more open among ourselves and to the general public. I hope to discuss some of them in more detail in my later posts.

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Corrections to recent media coverage on the mirror matter theory

One piece of news regarding mirror matter studies was published in June, this year by New Scientist as a cover story titled “We’ve seen signs of a mirror-image universe that is touching our own”. I was interviewed and also quoted in this article. But I was not informed that the article was actually centered about Leah Broussard’s experiment at Oak Ridge national laboratory. As a matter of fact, I was not aware of it at all. The ironic part is that her experiment, as far as I understand, will not uncover any new physics if my new model is correct while I was quoted in the article like a theorist endorsing this and other similar experiments.

I was not aware of this article until one of my Chinese friends showed me the Chinese version of the article. Then I read the full English version from my institution’s library (the online version is not free). The article could have been a good one had the author replaced the experiments with, or at least focused on the ones discussed in the APS april meeting this year. Here are the links to the talks on neutron lifetime experiments at the meeting: session C14 and session D14. I wish I could have attended that meeting.

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Converting dark matter search programs to mirror matter studies

In light of the newly developed model (M3 and SM3 ), if further confirmed, most effort of current dark matter search will be destined to failures. Indeed, there is nothing to detect if there is no direct interaction, however weak, between normal particles and dark (mirror) particles. This makes all the Weakly-Interacting-Massive-Particle-like (WIMP-like) or axion search programs to no avail. However, the advancement of the detection technology with the past efforts including those for the detection of neutrinos could be rekindled to a new life for the studies of mirror matter.

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Consistent origin of matter-antimatter imbalance and dark matter in the early universe

This is an excerpt for media people or science journalists. A good story could be written from my two newly published papers (out of six). My personal goal would be to wake up some of the most relevant experimentalists. This should be a win-win situation and I hope it won’t fall on deaf ears. Here is the plain-English summary of the two published works (arXiv:1902.01837 & arXiv:1904.03835):

Matter-antimatter asymmetry and dark matter as two of the biggest puzzles in the Universe can be consistently and quantitatively understood under a new mirror-matter theory. The new theory assumes that there exist two parallel sectors of particles that share nothing but gravity and it leads to neutral particle oscillations because of slightly broken mirror symmetry. Specifically, neutron and kaon oscillations with new understanding of quark condensation and phase transition processes in the early Universe provide the necessary mechanism. The idea is that kaon oscillations first create a potential amount of matter-antimatter asymmetry at the stage of strange quark condensation. A new topological transition process (coined “quarkiton”) can then preserve the generated matter-antimatter asymmetry. Without such an asymmetry, we would not have lived in a universe of galaxies and stars. In the end, neutron oscillations convert most of the matter to mirror matter which corresponds to the dark matter we have observed today. Under the same framework, another so-called U(1) or strong CP problem that has baffled particle physicists for almost half a century is understood as well.

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Paper on matter-antimatter imbalance (another M\(^3\) work) accepted for publication

Another paper for the study of baryon asymmetry of the universe based on the mirror-matter model (M3) has just been accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D.

This is another piece of work that firmly establishes the connections between the new mirror-matter model and cosmology. It is also the bridge leading to the full-fledged extended Standard Model with Mirror Matter (SM3).

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Supersymmetry and Mirror Symmetry

Nature’s supersymmetry (SUSY) is not what most physicists have thought about. It is not making a copy of all existing particles and giving these superparticles some fancy names like something-ino or s-otherthing.

The big mistake on SUSY has been to confuse some properties of SUSY with those of mirror symmetry which has not drawn deserved attention from the physics community. It is actually the mirror symmetry that makes a mirrored copy of particles in our known sector.

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Dark Energy and extended Standard Model with Mirror Matter (SM\(^3\))

The newly proposed phenomenological mirror-matter model (M3) has just been developed into a full-fledged theory – extended Standard Model with Mirror Matter (SM3). Dark energy is simply understood as the leftover vacuum energy due to the spontaneous mirror symmetry breaking.

Here is the link: https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.11838

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Call for experimentalists to conduct laboratory mirror-matter tests

Technology is ready for various laboratory tests on the new mirror-matter model. The predicted new physics could be discovered right around the corner. If you are an experimental physicist, you may be interested in conducting such tests. See arXiv:1906.10262 for details or the following for a brief summary:

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