Our universe may exist in parallel with other universes in other sets of dimensions, or braneworlds, so things from our Universe might somehow end up in another, some cosmologists suggest, says Technology Review Physics arXiv Blog.

Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur in Belgium and a few others showed how matter might make the leap in the presence of large magnetic potentials. That provided a theoretical basis for real matter swapping.

Today, Sarrazin and associates say that our galaxy might produce a magnetic potential large enough to make this happen for real. If so, we ought to be able to observe matter leaping back and forth between universes in the lab. In fact, such observations might already have been made in certain experiments.

The experiments in question involve trapping ultracold neutrons in bottles at places like the Institut Laue Langevin in Grenoble, France, and the Saint Petersburg Institute of Nuclear Physics.

Ref.: Michael Sarrazin et al., Experimental Limits On Neutron Disappearance Into Another Braneworld, arxiv.org/abs/1201.3949