J. Wang

We propose that dark matter consists of topological order, so gapped anyon excitations decay to generate the Standard Model's lepton asymmetry.

The universe contains more matter than antimatter, a mismatch that existing physics struggles to explain. This work proposes dark matter consists of a highly entangled topological quantum medium, in which non-particle gapped anyon excitations generate the primordial lepton-to-baryon asymmetry. The new mechanism, topological leptogenesis, links dark matter, neutrino physics, quantum entanglement and cosmic origins.

In the standard lore, the baryon asymmetry of the present universe is attributed to the leptogenesis from the sterile right-handed neutrino with heavy Majorana mass decaying into the Standard Model's leptons at the very early universe -- called the Majorana fermion's leptogenesis; while the electroweak sphaleron causes baryogenesis at a later time. In this work, we propose a new mechanism, named topological leptogenesis, to explain the lepton asymmetry. Topological leptogenesis replaces some of the sterile neutrinos by introducing a new gapped topological order sector (whose low-energy exhibits topological quantum field theory with long-range entanglement) that can cancel the baryon minus lepton (B−L) mixed gauge-gravitational anomaly of the Standard Model. Then the Beyond-the-Standard-Model dark matter consists of topological quantum matter, such that the gapped non-particle excitations of extended line and surface defect with fractionalization and anyon charges can decay into the Standard Model particles. In addition, gravitational leptogenesis can be regarded as an intermediate step (between Majorana particle leptogenesis and topological non-particle leptogenesis) to mediate such decaying processes from the highly entangled gapped topological order excitations.