Rochelle salt: a prototype of particle physics

Rochelle salt has a remarkable characteristic of becoming more ordered for a range of high temperatures before melting. In the particle physics language this means more symmetry breaking for high T. In many realistic field theories this is a perfectly consistent scenario which has profound consequences in the early universe. In particular, it implies that there may be no domain wall and monopole problems, and it may also play an important role in baryogenesis if CP and P are broken spontaneously. In the case of the monopole problem this may require a large background charge of the universe. The natural candidates for this background charge are a possible lepton number in the neutrino sea or global continuous R-charges in supersymmetric theories. (author)