Summary:
For a long time,
Protons were thought to be stable - that the laws of physics would not allow for a proton (which is baryonic matter) to spontaneously decay into
positron and
photon (non-baryonic matter) because of conservation of the
baryon number. However, it has been recently worked out that the predominance of
matter over
antimatter in the
universe is the result of a very slight imbalance in the ratio that occurred very early in its formation. This imbalance was exceptionally small; something like 1 in every 10,000 particles, but after most of the matter and antimatter annihilated, there what was left over was all the baryonic matter in our current universe. This means that in essence, rather than breaking the law of conservation of the baryon number, proton decay is actually the inevitable mechanism for bringing the baryon number back to equilibrium - correcting, if you will, the original imbalance that made all current matter in our universe possible.
Technical Details:
Given a vast period of time (protons are theorized to have a half-life of 1031 years), a proton will decay into a positron and a pion? that itself immediately decays to photon in the range of [gamma radiation]?
p->e^+ pi0
This process has yet to be proven experimentally, but is predicted by many Grand Unification Theories (see theory of everything)
Further Reading
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