Some Fascination With Antimatter !!

Some Fascination With Antimatter !!

Written By Mr Tyler Horoho(IG:Strange_Antiquark)

All of US Love Quantum Physics!! maybe not but the eagerness to understand the mystery of matter,antimatter and exotic matter is deep down there.

Quantum mechanics is very fascinating when it comes to the things which are unbelievable.

Today We're Going To unveil One Such Mystery! Called....

Antimatter!

What is Antimatter?

Antimatter was theorized by Paul Dirac in 1928 and first discovered in 1932 by Carl Anderson when positrons were found in cosmic ray tracks. If you don’t know what antimatter is, it has almost all the same properties as normal matter but with opposite electric charge. So an antielectron (more often called a positron) has the same mass, spin properties, size, and everything else as an electron, but with an opposite electric charge. Some particles can be their own antiparticle, like the charge-neutral photon (so there is no anti-photon). Another important thing about antimatter is that when it interacts with regular matter of the same kind, the two annihilate each other and leave behind pure energy in the form of photons.

Since the Discovery...

Since the discovery of antimatter in 1932, we have extensively studies antimatter and its properties. At the Large Hadron Collider, we have created anti-hydrogen, an atom made of an anti-proton and a positron. Remarkably, anti-hydrogen behaves exactly the same way as hydrogen. This leads us to suspect that we would not be able to tell the difference between matter and antimatter if they don’t interact with each other. So in theory, there could be a whole galaxy out there completely made of antimatter, and we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference from just looking at it.

Matter And Antimatter

So how do we know that’s likely not true? As I mentioned earlier, matter and antimatter destroy each other in bright, energetic explosions. If there is a galaxy completely made of antimatter, there will have to be a border where everything switches from matter to antimatter. At this border, we would see high energy radiation from the annihilation of matter and antimatter. But we don’t see that anywhere in the universe. Other than trace amounts created in some radioactive decays, our universe is devoid of antimatter.

What happened to all the Antimatter?

What happened to all the antimatter? The laws of physics as we know them give us no clear explanation for why the universe created more matter than antimatter. To this day, it is still one of the biggest unsolved problems in physics. There are theories which can explain this asymmetry, but none of them have been experimentally verified. To explain the asymmetry, these theories make use of a weird property of the universe called charge-parity (CP) violation.

Remember in the opening paragraph I said antimatter behaves almost the same way as matter? We used to think that the outcome of an experiment shouldn’t change if the particles involved were switched with their antiparticles (the “C” in CP) and the coordinates were inverted, like looking in a mirror (the “P” in CP). But we learned from experiments in the 1960’s that antiparticles behave slightly differently than their particle counterparts in some radioactive decays. This difference is what’s called CP violation, and it could help explain why there’s no antimatter. From these experiments we know there is some CP violation in the universe, but it’s not enough to explain the amount of matter we see.

One experiment that could explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry is finding the neutron’s electric dipole moment (EDM). The neutron EDM violates CP symmetry, and in the range it is being measured now it could fill in a lot of the gaps in our CP violation puzzle. I have provided more information about how this works and how difficult the neutron EDM is to measure in a post on my Instagram account called “How neutrons could explain the Universe’s matter-antimatter asymmetry”.

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