Why antimatter does not survive

Every knot is born with its mirror image: a proton with an antiproton, an electron with a positron. Yet the universe is made almost entirely of matter, with roughly one surviving proton for every billion or so photons. In 1967 Andrei Sakharov showed that any explanation must meet three conditions. The number of matter particles must be able to change, matter and its mirror image must behave slightly differently, and the process must run far from equilibrium.

RSI meets all three. In the Exhale, knots form and unzip back into the Rest-State, so matter can be made and unmade. That process is violent and one-directional. And the medium's circulation has a handedness, so a knot and its mirror image do not meet the same flow. Braids that twist with the circulation lock into place slightly more often. Their mirror images unzip slightly more often before they can settle. Any antiknot that survives and later meets a knot annihilates with it: their opposite wakes mesh perfectly, both unzip, and their energy leaves as light. What remains is the surplus of matter.

The bias acts only at formation. A finished antiproton is as stable as a proton and its exact mirror image, as the BASE experiment at CERN confirms to 16 parts per trillion.

Independent results point the same way. In 2025 the LHCb experiment observed for the first time that a baryon and its antimatter partner decay at different rates, by 2.45 percent, a difference the Standard Model's own mechanism is far too weak to turn into the matter surplus. In rotating superfluids, vortices that circulate with the rotation are stable while those turning the other way are driven out, and a 1996 experiment in flowing superfluid helium-3, built as a laboratory model of the early universe, showed the flow deciding which new vortex rings grew and which collapsed. In 2017 the STAR experiment found that a rotating quark-gluon fluid aligns the spins of the particles it creates. And polarization maps of the cosmic microwave background show a slight rotation of about a quarter of a degree, a tentative sign that the universe as a whole has a handedness.

The open step is to derive the strength of the bias from the medium's circulation and show that it gives about six protons for every ten billion photons.