Several of the very foundations of the cosmological standard model -- the baryon asymmetry of the universe, dark matter, and the origin of the hot big bang itself -- still call for an explanation from the perspective of fundamental physics. This work advocates one intriguing possibility for a consistent cosmology that fills in the theoretical gaps while being fully in accordance with the observational data. At very high energies, the universe might have been in a false vacuum state that preserved B-L, the difference between the baryon number B and the lepton number L as a local symmetry. In...

Several of the very foundations of the cosmological standard model -- the baryon asymmetry of the universe, dark matter, and the origin of the hot big bang itself -- still call for an explanation from the perspective of fundamental physics. This work advocates one intriguing possibility for a consistent cosmology that fills in the theoretical gaps while being fully in accordance with the observational data. At very high energies, the universe might have been in a false vacuum state that preserved B-L, the difference between the baryon number B and the lepton number L as a local symmetry. In...