Andrei Sakharov Created 2026-10-20 Updated 2026-11-05
Andrei Sakharov connected the cosmic excess of matter over antimatter with microscopic particle reactions. His 1967 paper proposed baryon number violation and CP violation in the expanding early universe as ingredients for generating a baryon asymmetry. The resulting Sakharov conditions also require departure from thermal equilibrium in the usual reaction-based setting: otherwise inverse reactions and symmetry constraints erase the attempted asymmetry. This turns an astronomical abundance question into a test of particle interactions and cosmological history.[ref]
Figure 1.
Portrait of Andrei Sakharov
. RIA Novosti archive, image 25981 / Vladimir Fedorenko / CC-BY-SA 3.0; photographed 1 March 1989. Existing Commons close-up crop by JB Hoang Tam 2 (2025). CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Source.