Focus on the origin of matter

The origin of matter in the Universe is a fascinating cosmological puzzle that has triggered a formidable intellectual enterprise, started in 1967 with the prescient paper by Andrej Sakharov (1967 Pisma Zh. Eksp. Teor. Fiz. 5 32; 1967 JETP Lett. 52 4; 1991 Sov. Phys.-Usp. 34 392; 1991 Usp. Fiz. Nauk 161 61) aimed at relating a cosmological observation to the fundamental laws of physics, the goal of baryogenesis. A successful model of baryogenesis should ultimately identify the required source of charge parity violation and the origin of the cosmological matter-antimatter asymmetry. This focus issue is not only a review of the main ideas that have been proposed in baryogenesis but should also bear witness to the great vitality of the field and to show how future experimental results could bring a breakthrough in baryogenesis during the coming years. For this reason we selected, out of the multitude of proposed baryogenesis models, those that will more likely experience a significant experimental test during the coming years.