Cosmon or Cosmonium is a hypothetical form of matter. The idea was originally proposed by

Georges Lemaître Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître ( ; ; 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Catholic priest, theoretical physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first to th ...

, who suggested the concept of a 'primeval atom’ (''L'Hypothèse de l'Atome Primitif'') 1946. He illustrated the idea by imagining an object 30 times larger than the volume of the sun containing all the matter of the Universe. Its density would be around

10^\text^

. In his view, this occurred somewhere between 20–60 billion years ago. The idea of a primeval “super-atom” lived on and was developed forward by

Maurice Goldhaber Maurice Goldhaber (April 18, 1911 – May 11, 2011) was an American physicist, who in 1957 (with Lee Grodzins and Andrew Sunyar) established that neutrinos have negative helicity. Early life and childhood He was born on April 18, 1911, in L ...

in 1956. In his proposal there would have been a point, which had been called a Universon, that would have collapsed into a Cosmon and an Anticosmon pair. Goldhaber was questioned why is there any matter if equal amounts of matter and antimatter were formed in the

big bang The Big Bang event is a physical theory that describes how the universe expanded from an initial state of high density and temperature. Various cosmological models of the Big Bang explain the evolution of the observable universe from t ...

. One explanation for this is the

asymmetry Asymmetry is the absence of, or a violation of, symmetry (the property of an object being invariant to a transformation, such as reflection). Symmetry is an important property of both physical and abstract systems and it may be displayed in pre ...

of matter meaning that there could have been slightly more matter than antimatter, for instance 1001 matter particles to every 1000 antimatter. In Goldhabers model cosmon and anticosmon would have flown apart and therefore explaining issue without asymmetry. In 1989,

Hans Dehmelt Hans Georg Dehmelt (; 9 September 1922 – 7 March 2017) was a German and American physicist, who was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1989, for co-developing the ion trap technique (Penning trap) with Wolfgang Paul, for which they shared one-h ...

attempted to modernize the idea of the primeval atom. In this hypothesis, Cosmonium would have been the heaviest form of matter at the beginning of the big bang.

References

{{Reflist, 30em Physical cosmology Hypothetical elementary particles