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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2017
With the advent of grand unified theories (GUTs) has come the concept (among others) that baryons (protons, etc.) can decay by changing into leptons (“Diamonds are not forever.”) and vice versa, baryonic matter can be created from the thermal blackbody radiation in the early universe (provided, of course, that the hot big-bang model is basically correct). Using this concept, models have been suggested to generate a universal baryon asymmetry, with the consequence that no important amount of antimatter would be left in the universe at the present time (see, e.g. Langacker 1981 and references therein). These models have been motivated by observational constraints on antimatter, at least in our little corner of the universe (Steigman 1976). However, some of these constraints have been shown to be overrestrlctive (Stecker 1978, Allen 1981) and an alternative model, also based on GUTs, has been suggested which maintains matter-antimatter (I.e., baryon) symmetry on a universal scale, but results in separate “fossil domains” of clusters of matter galaxies and clusters of antimatter galaxies.