Paper 7a: baryogenesis, withdrawn

The last archived paper in the series died of the simplest cause in this archive: it was built on a foundation that had already collapsed, and nobody had checked the foundation’s status label. Paper 7a is the baryogenesis paper, and its post is short because its lesson is one sentence long: before building on a result, read the result’s label.

What it tried

Baryogenesis is the explanation for why the universe contains matter rather than equal parts matter and antimatter: some mechanism in the early universe produced slightly more baryons than antibaryons, the excess survived annihilation, and everything we are is the residue. The standard ingredient list is Sakharov’s: baryon number violation, out-of-equilibrium dynamics, and charge-parity violation. The paper attempted a framework version: the boundary category’s instanton physics provides the baryon number violation, the branch dynamics provides the out-of-equilibrium drive, and the flavour sector provides the charge-parity violation, with an efficiency coefficient converting the asymmetry into the observed baryon-to-photon ratio.

How it died

The paper’s baryon-number-violating term was constructed from the anyon Standard Model functor of Paper 7, the paper about the functor that failed its multiplicity check and was archived. By the time 7a was written, 7 was already archived, and the functor it needed was among the parts that did not survive. The mechanism’s violation term had no foundation. Nothing in the paper was individually wrong: the Sakharov accounting was fine, the thermodynamics was fine. But the load-bearing input was a retracted result, and nobody had traced the dependency.

The efficiency coefficient, audited later, turned out to have the same disease as kappa in the neutrino paper: back-solved from the observed baryon asymmetry, reverse-engineered from the answer. So the paper lost its foundation and its prediction within one audit cycle.

Why this archive entry exists

Three reasons, and the third is the one that changed how the programme works. First, baryogenesis remains a legitimate open target for the framework: the instanton physics of Paper 3, in its surviving theta-vacuum form, is exactly the kind of mechanism that could violate baryon number, and a future paper can attempt it on a foundation that exists. Second, the back-solved coefficient joined the corrections series as the cleanest example of the species. Third, and most useful: the programme now maintains a dependency ledger. Every paper lists which prior results it consumes, with each input’s status label attached, and a rule that building on a benchmark requires stating it and building on an archived result is forbidden. Paper 7a is the reason that ledger exists.

The archive is now complete: five corpses, four distinct failure modes, one dependency rule. The next series is the method behind all of it.