Physicists believe a family of hidden particles may be responsible for all the dark matter in the universe and why any matter exists at all. The study was published on the arXiv preprint server, writes Live Science.

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One of the biggest mysteries for physicists is why the Universe was initially filled with matter.. It also remains a mystery why there is very little antimatter in the Universe and ordinary matter dominates.. It is known that when particles and antiparticles interact, they destroy each other, but why didn’t this happen in the early Universe and why didn’t everything disappear altogether

The main theory is that some unknown process led to the imbalance of matter and antimatter in the Universe in the first moments after the Big Bang. The study's authors believe that elusive elementary particles, neutrinos, are involved in this process..

Today, physicists know that there are three types of neutrinos, and each of them has strange properties.. Neutrinos have a very small mass, which is much less than the mass of electrons. These particles are also left-handed, meaning their internal spins only orient in one direction while moving, unlike all other particles, which can orient in both directions.

There is an assumption that in fact neutrinos have not three, but more types that have not yet been discovered and they are right-handed analogues of known neutrinos. The fact is that interactions between left-handed and right-handed types of neutrinos can lead to the fact that they will have mass, physicists say.

The authors of the new study believe that there are two types of right-handed neutrinos that have very large masses. Scientists' calculations show that shortly after the Big Bang there was a perfect balance of left-handed and right-handed. But as the Universe expanded and cooled, this balance was upset, leading to a breaking of symmetry, causing left-handed neutrinos to gain mass and right-handed neutrinos to disappear.

The study found that this process had other consequences as well.. As neutrinos interact with other elementary particles, their broken symmetry caused a chain reaction that upset the balance between matter and antimatter. Scientists also came to the conclusion that right-handed neutrinos mixed and created a new elementary particle called majoron. This is a hypothetical particle that is its own antiparticle, and physicists' calculations have shown that there could have been a lot of it in the very early Universe.

Physicists believe that majoron then survived, although it became invisible and elusive, but makes up the majority of the mass of each galaxy. That is, it is these particles that may consist of the mysterious dark matter that fills the Universe and is several times more abundant than ordinary matter.

One mechanism may explain the strange properties of neutrinos, the process that led to the dominance of matter over antimatter, and the emergence of dark matter, physicists say.. So far there is no evidence for the existence of right-handed neutrinos and majoron.

But scientists believe that modern neutrino detectors can detect them.

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