The birth of matter (from which we are made of): baryogenesis in the primordial Universe

In a similar way to the case of Education in Chemistry, where it is implicitly assumed that the elements of the Periodic Table exist with their “natural” abundances without their origin and evolution being ever discussed, the case of the origin of protons and neutrons that constitute the matter that we are made of is generally neglected. Discussions of the Big Bang in the classroom do not address or emphasize into one of the main foundations of this model: the early Universe was quite different from the current one, probably symmetrical in matter and antimatter, and there was a time when this changed irreversibly to produce, after billions of years, the Universe we observe today. We present in this work a pedagogical discussion of the complex problem of the origin of matter in the Universe, with emphasis on the observed facts and on the qualitative conditions that the scenarios need to explain them.

Keywords:
Origin of matter; Big Bang; baryons