Matter and antimatter patches formed before inflation: a zero-sum hypothesis for the origin of the observed asymmetry

It is proposed that the matter–antimatter asymmetry does not result from a global excess, but from a spatial separation established before the hot Big Bang, with zero total sum. In the vacuum preceding the hot universe, pairs of charges +1 and −1 emerge and cluster by sign into clusters of charge ±2, ±3, …, and clusters of opposite sign annihilate, leaving the difference as a remainder; space divides into matter and antimatter patches, and the observable universe would be the interior of a single patch. In a two-dimensional model, the relative remainder of a region falls with its size, as N^−0.61, and stays tens of orders of magnitude below the observed one at the size of the visible universe. No charge carried by particles survives inflation, which dilutes it by e⁻³ᴺ: 28 to 59 orders of magnitude are missing. The form that survives separates sign from quantity: a complex scalar field keeps only the phase θ₀ of each patch during inflation, and the charge is created afterwards, proportional to c·A³·sin 3θ₀, where A is the field amplitude. Three-dimensional lattice simulations with expansion show that several patches in the same volume leave half of the subregions with antimatter, which requires a single patch in the visible universe. Inside a patch with a small charge, the field breaks into clusters of both signs: in a box without expansion, with the clusters resolved, the opposite-sign charge reaches 92% of the majority charge, and a Q-ball and an anti-Q-ball that collide pass through each other instead of leaving only the difference. In realization A, the field is the inflaton of an earlier model by the author, whose phase θ* the hypothesis explains, and the decay of the clusters is reheating itself, with baryon isocurvature ≈ 3 × 10⁻⁷. In realization B, a light spectator field gives baryon isocurvature between ~3 × 10⁻⁶ and ~5 × 10⁻⁵, the current limit, with the inflationary scale of realization A, and, in its minimal model, does not fragment. A Fisher forecast shows that the cosmic microwave background, even with LiteBIRD and the Simons Observatory, reaches only ~3.4 × 10⁻⁵ and tests only the top of that window. If the visible universe lies close to the edge of its patch, the quadrupole, the dipole and the modulation of Ω_b h² bound the gradient of η across the sky to ≲ 2%. In both realizations, the observed ratio, 1 remainder for ~1.6 × 10⁹ annihilated pairs, is accommodated by a parameter, not predicted. The record contains the article in English and in Portuguese, the code and results of all tests (codigo_e_dados.zip) and the raw data of the long T1 runs (t1_longas.json.gz).