Helping to unravel a cosmic puzzle (Image: PM Images/Getty)
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TAKE a good look the next time your headphone cable ends up in a tangled mess. The ballooning of the cosmos might be down to knottiness.
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The universe is thought to have expanded rapidly just a fraction of a second after the big bang, undergoing a period of what鈥檚 called inflation 鈥� or so the theory goes. It鈥檚 still not clear what could have provided the energy to drive inflation, and observational evidence for this growth spurt has been inconclusive.
Now Arjun Berera of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and his colleagues have come up with a model that explains both inflation and why the universe has three spatial dimensions (see also 鈥�What came before the Big Bang?鈥�).
According to their theory, the early cosmos was flooded with particles resembling gluons 鈥� the force-carriers that stick quarks together to form protons and neutrons. As the universe cooled, stringy objects called flux tubes formed between the particles.
The tubes are a bit like the field lines you see when scattering iron filings around a magnet, but they are so densely packed that, like any kind of string, they become knotted. 鈥淚f you take your headphones and put them in your backpack, they tend to get tangled,鈥� says Berera. 鈥淭hat鈥檚 exactly the picture we鈥檙e describing.鈥�
The network of entangled flux tubes contains a lot of energy 鈥� enough to drive inflation ().
Knots can only form in three dimensions 鈥� add more, and the loops can pass through the extra dimensions and unlink. So Berera鈥檚 proposal could explain the three dimensions we see: they were needed for the flux-tube network to form.
鈥淚 think it鈥檚 an idea that鈥檚 worth exploring,鈥� says Alan Guth at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the founders of inflation theory. But Berera鈥檚 team has yet to make testable predictions, so it鈥檚 still early days.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淐osmic knots inflated the universe鈥�