What is Antimatter? FAQ: The story of the discovery of antimatter How to make antimatter at home

The conjecture about the existence of antiparticles, antimatter, and possibly even antiworlds appeared long before the appearance of experimental data indicating the possibility of their existence in nature.

1. The first assumptions about the existence of antimatter

For the first time the concept of "antimatter" was coined by the English physicist Arthur Schuster in 1898, almost immediately after the discovery of the electron by Joseph Thomson. Schuster really wanted symmetry to triumph in nature. An electron, as you know, is a negatively charged particle (here, however, it should be noted that the decision which charge to call positive and which negative was the result of an agreement; scientists could also agree on the reverse designation of charge signs, and nothing has changed from this b), and Schuster suggested the existence of a symmetrical analogue of the electron, positively charged and called by him the antielectron. From his hypothesis immediately followed the idea of ​​the existence of anti-atoms and anti-matter, from where it is possible to draw out the anti-electrons invented by him in the anti-Thomson anti-experiment by an electric field. For several years, Schuster tried to convince the surrounding scientists of the legitimacy of his conjecture (“Why shouldn’t there be negatively charged gold, as yellow as ours,” he wrote in his article in the journal Nature), but no one heeded his arguments. Scientific pragmatism, established over many centuries, suggested that only experiment should be believed, and everything that is not confirmed by experiment is unscientific fantasy. And the experiment then inexorably asserted that negatively charged electrons can be pulled out of matter, while positively charged ones are not observed.

Schuster's idea was forgotten, and antimatter was rediscovered by Paul Dirac only 30 years later. He also did this hypothetically, but was much more convincing than Schuster, showing that the existence of antimatter solves a lot of accumulated unresolved problems at that moment. Before moving on to Dirac's ideas, we will have to recall what new conclusions physics has come to in these 30 years.

2. Creation of the atom by Niels Bohr

At the beginning of the 20th century, there was a need to rethink the laws of physics. At first, they came across the impossibility of describing the spectrum of an absolutely black body using only the laws of Newton and Maxwell, and a little later they found out that classical laws do not allow describing an atom. According to chemists, the atom is indivisible, and from their point of view they are absolutely right, since in all chemical reactions atoms simply “move” from one molecule to another, but one can probably forgive the blasphemy of physicists who wished to first decompose this atom into components, and then assemble according to the strict laws of physics. By 1913, the decomposition of the atom was not bad: no one then had any doubts that, for example, the simplest hydrogen atom consists of a positively charged proton, experimentally discovered by Rutherford a little later, and an electron. It would seem that there is everything necessary for assembling an atom: in addition to the proton and electron, there is an electric force of attraction between them, which should keep them together. It was possible to assemble the atom, but not to keep it in a stable state for a long time: the electron inexorably fell on the proton and did not want to remain in the given orbit. Niels Bohr succeeded in fixing this system, for this he abandoned the classical laws of mechanics for describing systems at distances of the order of the size of an atom. Rather, Bohr had to abandon the concept of an electron as a small solid charged ball and imagine it as a loose cloud, and to describe it, it was necessary to create a new mathematical apparatus developed by many outstanding physicists of the early 20th century and called "quantum mechanics".

By the mid-1920s, quantum mechanics, which replaced classical mechanics when it was necessary to describe something very small, was already firmly established. The Schrödinger equation, which is based on quantum ideas, successfully described many experiments, for example, the experiment with the spectrum of a hydrogen lamp (heated hydrogen shines not just with white light, but with a small number of spectral lines) placed in a magnetic field in which each line is slightly split for a few more lines.

3. The problem of negative energies

By the time when they unconditionally believed in quantum mechanics, another theory was formed - (relativistic mechanics), which works at very high speeds. When the speeds of bodies are comparable to the speed of light, Newton's laws of mechanics also need to be corrected. Scientists have tried to cross two limiting cases: high speeds (the theory of relativity) and very small distances (quantum mechanics). It turned out that there is nothing difficult in writing an equation that satisfies both quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity. A generalization of the Schrödinger equation to the case of relativistic systems was proposed independently by Klein, Gordon and Fock (the latter is our compatriot). But the solutions to this equation did not suit us very much. One of the paradoxes with solutions is Klein's paradox: for very fast particles hitting a high barrier, from which, in theory, they should be reflected, the probability of jumping over the barrier, according to this equation, only increases with its height - a conclusion that contradicts common sense.

Another absurdity of the relativistic equation was that particles with negative energies appeared among the solutions of the equation. What's so terrible about that? Imagine that with the help of quantum mechanics we have arranged our world. It seemed to have a floor on which one could stand steadily, and we create comfort: we hang pictures on the walls, we put books on the shelves. All our decorations are exactly subject to quantum mechanics, they all have positive energy, and if we hang something badly, they will fall to the floor. But, trying to improve quantum mechanics, to make it more correct, we discovered that there is no gender in our world. Instead of a floor, there is a gaping abyss (negative energies) where everything must fall. We must pay tribute to the endurance of the physicists of that time: they were not afraid that the world would fall apart before their eyes, but tried to solve this problem.

The problem was solved by Paul Dirac, who undertook to describe a particle more complex than the one that describes the Klein-Gordon-Fock equation, the electron. An electron cannot be described by one function, two must be taken at once, and this pair cannot be divided, and one has to write a system of equations. It would seem that the problem only became more complicated (and at first glance this complication does not solve the main problem), but Dirac tried to complete the solution. For electrons, the Pauli principle works, which states that two electrons cannot be placed in the same state: no efforts can squeeze the second electron into an already occupied one. Dirac, undertaking this task, apparently hoped to use precisely this property: if below the floor level all states are already filled with electrons, then there will be nowhere to fall through. It would seem that the task is hopeless: it is necessary to fill the abyss of infinite depth with electrons. And Dirac just shrugged his shoulders: “Why should we worry about it? We will assume that nature has already taken care of this (and it is omnipotent), everything has already been flooded, and our floor is there. Thus, the problem of negative energies was resolved!

4. Antimatter

However, when writing down his equation, Dirac ran into a new problem: it turns out that two functions are not enough for a relativistic description of an electron, you have to write four! What are these two extra functions for an electron? After a little thought, Dirac realized that bubbles - holes can form on our flooded floor (nature, of course, is omnipotent, but it can afford to be not entirely perfect and allow some defects). Surprisingly, such a bubble behaves in exactly the same way as an electron, which, by analogy with a bubble, looks like a droplet hanging above the floor: they have the same mass, they are both charged. The hanging droplet has positive energy and is negatively charged, in fact, this is our electron. And the bubble (in the underground world) also has positive energy, but its charge sign is reversed - it is an antielectron (or positron). To describe it, two extra functions were needed.

Dirac was inspired by his discovery. He was convinced that antiparticles were real, although they had never before been observed in an experiment. Antiparticles were discovered several years later, and colleagues were skeptical about Dirac's idea, despite the obvious success of his theory (note that antiparticles also resolved Klein's paradox). Dirac apparently believed unconditionally in his theory. Trying to find an answer to the criticism of the unobservability of positrons, he quickly realized that positrons cannot live with us. If they arose somewhere near us, they would immediately annihilate with the surrounding electrons. Therefore, he quite reasonably suggested that if our solar system is made up of electrons and particles in general, then there is no place for antiparticles, they should be sought in other galaxies that are not in contact with ours. Now we believe that, most likely, antigalaxies do not exist: the reason is that antimatter is slightly different from matter.

The positrons invented by Dirac were soon discovered by Karl Anderson in . They were born from energetic cosmic photons paired with electrons, but before the subsequent annihilation they managed to fly some distance and leave traces. Interestingly, the positron could have been discovered 5 years earlier by the outstanding Russian physicist Dmitry Skobeltsin, who saw the positron, but he himself could not believe in his discovery. All particles must have antiparticles, with the exception of truly neutral ones, such as the photon (for the photon, the antiparticle is itself), and today they are all open. We only see them in special experiments. Therefore, antimatter is often perceived as a completely abstract, perhaps beautiful, but it is not clear why an invented concept. Indeed, everything that was discussed earlier is only the fact of the existence of antiparticles, but in the nature around us there are almost none of them, and what's the point even if they learned how to obtain them in laboratories? But do not rush to conclusions! We have already learned not only to obtain antiparticles, but also to use them for our needs.

5. Application of antimatter

Antimatter does not seem to affect our daily life. Nevertheless, today we use for some quite practical problems at least the most common and relatively easy to obtain antiparticle - the positron. One of the applications of positrons was found in medicine for. There are radioactive nuclei that emit positrons, which, having flown out of the nucleus, instantly annihilate with electrons from neighboring atoms, turning into two photons. The patient takes a small amount of a glucose analogue with a radioactive impurity (the dose is very small and does not harm health), the glucose-like substance accumulates in actively growing cells, which are cancer cells. It is in the tumor that frequent electron-positron annihilation will occur, and finding the exact place in the body from where photons often fly out remains a technical challenge, and this is done contactlessly: a scanning device that captures photons passes around the patient. This method, which allows you to diagnose and accurately locate the tumor, is called positron emission tomography.

Positrons are also used in materials science. With the help of a special positron microscope, which shoots positrons at the object under study, it is possible to study the surfaces of semiconductors for their use in electronics. And you can simply study samples of any materials, determine the "fatigue" of materials and find microdefects in them. So this seemingly completely abstract field of knowledge serves the very specific interests of people.

In 1930, the famous English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac, deriving a relativistic equation of motion for the electron field, also obtained a solution for some other particle with the same mass and opposite, positive, electric charge. The only particle with a positive charge known at that time, the proton, could not be this twin, since it differed significantly from the electron, including thousands of times more mass.

Later, in 1932, the American physicist Carl Anderson confirmed Dirac's predictions. By studying cosmic rays, he discovered the antiparticle of the electron, which today is called the positron. 23 years later, antiprotons were discovered at an American accelerator, and a year later, an antineutron.

Particles and antiparticles

As you know, any elementary particle has a number of characteristics, numbers that describe it. Among them are the following:

• Mass is a physical quantity that determines the gravitational interaction of an object.
• Spin - intrinsic angular momentum of an elementary particle.
• Electric charge - a characteristic indicating the possibility of creating an electromagnetic field by the body, and participating in electromagnetic interaction.
• Color charge is an abstract concept that explains the interaction of quarks and the formation of other particles - hadrons.

Also other various quantum numbers that determine the properties and states of particles. If we describe an antiparticle, then in simple terms it is a mirror image of a particle with the same mass and electric charge. Why are scientists so interested in particles that are just partly similar and partly different from their originals?

It turned out that the collision of a particle and an antiparticle leads to annihilation - their destruction, and the release of the energy corresponding to them in the form of other high-energy particles, that is, a small explosion. Motivates to study antiparticles and the fact that the substance consisting of antiparticles (antimatter) is not formed independently in nature, according to the observations of scientists.

General information about antimatter

Based on the foregoing, it becomes clear that the observable Universe consists of matter, matter. However, following known physical laws, scientists are confident that as a result of the Big Bang, matter and antimatter must be formed in equal amounts, which we do not observe. Obviously, our understanding of the world is incomplete, and either scientists missed something in their calculations, or somewhere beyond our visibility, in remote parts of the Universe, there is a corresponding amount of antimatter, so to speak, “a world of antimatter”.

This question of antisymmetry seems to be one of the most famous unsolved problems in physics.

According to modern concepts, the structure of matter and antimatter are almost the same, for the reason that the electromagnetic and strong interactions that determine the structure of matter act equally in relation to particles and antiparticles. This fact was confirmed in November 2015 at the RHIC collider in the USA, when Russian and foreign scientists measured the strength of the interaction of antiprotons. It turned out to be equal to the force of interaction of protons.

Obtaining antimatter

The birth of antiparticles usually occurs during the formation of particle-antiparticle pairs. If the collision of an electron and its antiparticle - a positron, releases two gamma quanta, then to create an electron-positron pair, you will need a high-energy gamma quanta that interacts with the electric field of the atomic nucleus. Under laboratory conditions, this can happen in accelerators or in experiments with lasers. Under natural conditions - in pulsars and near black holes, as well as in the interaction of cosmic rays with certain types of matter.

What is antimatter? For understanding, it is enough to give the following example. The simplest substance, the hydrogen atom, consists of a single proton, which defines the nucleus, and an electron, which revolves around it. So antihydrogen is antimatter, the atom of which consists of an antiproton and a positron rotating around it.

General view of the ASACUSA facility at CERN, designed to produce and study antihydrogen

Despite the simple formulation, synthesizing antihydrogen is quite difficult. And yet, in 1995, at the LEAR accelerator at CERN, scientists managed to create 9 atoms of such antimatter, which lived for only 40 nanoseconds and disintegrated.

Later, with the help of massive devices, a magnetic trap was created that held 38 antihydrogen atoms for 172 milliseconds (0.172 seconds), and after 170,000 antihydrogen atoms, 0.28 attograms (10 -18 grams). Such a volume of antimatter may be sufficient for further study, and this is a success.

The cost of antimatter

Today, we can say with confidence that the most expensive substance in the world is not californium, regolith or graphene, and, of course, not gold, but antimatter. According to NASA calculations, the creation of one milligram of positrons will cost about 25 million dollars, and 1 g of antihydrogen is estimated at 62.5 trillion dollars. Interestingly, a nanogram of antimatter, the volume that was used in 10 years in CERN experiments, cost the organization hundreds of millions of dollars.

Application

The study of antimatter carries a significant potential for humanity. The first and most interesting device theoretically powered by antimatter is the warp drive. Some may remember one from the famous Star Trek TV series, the engine was powered by a reactor that works on the principle of annihilation of matter and antimatter.

In fact, there are several mathematical models of such an engine, and according to their calculations, very few antiparticles will be needed for future spacecraft. So, a seven-month flight to Mars can be reduced in duration to a month, due to 140 nanograms of antiprotons, which will act as a catalyst for nuclear fission in the ship's reactor. Thanks to such technologies, intergalactic flights can also be carried out, which will allow a person to study other star systems in detail, and in the future to colonize them.

However, antimatter, like many other scientific discoveries, can pose a threat to humanity. As you know, the most terrible catastrophe, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was carried out with the help of two atomic bombs, the total mass of which is 8.6 tons, and the power is about 35 kilotons. But in the collision of 1 kg of matter and 1 kg of antimatter, energy equal to 42,960 kilotons is released. The most powerful bomb ever developed by mankind - AN602 or "Tsar Bomba" released an energy of about 58,000 kilotons, but weighed 26.5 tons! Summing up all of the above, we can say with confidence that technologies and inventions based on antimatter can lead humanity to both an unprecedented breakthrough and complete self-destruction.

Antimatter has long been the subject of science fiction. In the Angels & Demons book and movie, Professor Langdon tries to save the Vatican from an antimatter bomb. The Star Trek spacecraft Enterprise uses an annihilating antimatter engine to travel faster than the speed of light. But antimatter is also the subject of our reality. Antimatter particles are virtually identical to their material counterparts, except that they carry opposite charge and spin. When antimatter meets matter, they instantly annihilate into energy, and this is no longer fiction.

Although antimatter bombs and ships based on the same fuel do not yet seem possible in practice, there are many facts about antimatter that will surprise you or allow you to brush up on what you already knew.

Antimatter was supposed to destroy all matter in the universe after the Big Bang

But we exist. And as far as physicists know, this is because for every billion pairs of matter-antimatter there was one extra particle of matter. Physicists are trying their best to explain this asymmetry.

Antimatter is closer to you than you think

There are other sources of antimatter that are closer to us. Bananas, for example, generate antimatter by emitting one positron - the antimatter equivalent of an electron - about once every 75 minutes. This is because bananas contain small amounts of potassium-40, a naturally occurring isotope of potassium. The decay of potassium-40 sometimes produces a positron.

Our bodies also contain potassium-40, which means you emit positrons too. Antimatter annihilates instantly on contact with matter, so these antimatter particles don't live very long.

Humans have managed to create quite a bit of antimatter

All the antiprotons created at the Fermi Laboratory's Tevatron particle accelerator are barely 15 nanograms. At CERN, only about 1 nanogram has been produced to date. In DESY in Germany - no more than 2 nanograms of positrons.

If all the antimatter created by people annihilates instantly, its energy will not even be enough to boil a cup of tea.

The problem lies in the efficiency and cost of producing and storing antimatter. Creating 1 gram of antimatter requires about 25 million billion kilowatt-hours of energy and costs over a million billion dollars. Not surprisingly, antimatter is sometimes included in the list of the ten most expensive substances in our world.

There is such a thing as an antimatter trap.

Charged particles of antimatter, like positrons and antiprotons, can be stored in so-called Penning traps. They are like tiny particle accelerators. Inside them, particles move in a spiral while magnetic and electric fields keep them from colliding with the walls of the trap.

However, Penning traps do not work for neutral particles like antihydrogen. Since they have no charge, these particles cannot be limited by electric fields. They are held in Ioffe traps that work by creating a region of space where the magnetic field gets stronger in all directions. Antimatter particles get stuck in the region with the weakest magnetic field.

The Earth's magnetic field can act as antimatter traps. Antiprotons have been found in certain zones around the Earth - the Van Allen radiation belts.

Antimatter can fall (literally)

Observing the gravitational effect in antimatter is not as easy as watching an apple fall from a tree. These experiments require keeping antimatter trapped or slowing it down by cooling it to temperatures just above absolute zero. And since gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces, physicists must use neutral antimatter particles in these experiments to prevent interaction with the more powerful force of electricity.

Antimatter being studied in particle moderators

In particle accelerator rings like the Large Hadron Collider, particles get an energetic boost each time they complete a circle. The moderators work in the opposite way: instead of dispersing the particles, they are pushed in the opposite direction.

Neutrinos can be their own antiparticles

Projects like the Majorana Demonstrator and EXO-200 aim to determine whether neutrinos are indeed Majorana particles by observing the behavior of so-called neutrinoless double beta decay.

Some radioactive nuclei decay simultaneously, emitting two electrons and two neutrinos. If neutrinos were their own antiparticles, they would annihilate after a binary decay, and scientists would be left with only electrons to observe.

The search for Majorana neutrinos could help explain why there is a matter-antimatter asymmetry. Physicists suggest that Majorana neutrinos can be either heavy or light. The lungs exist in our time, and the heavy ones existed immediately after the Big Bang. Heavy Majorana neutrinos decayed asymmetrically, resulting in a tiny amount of matter that filled our Universe.

Antimatter is used in medicine

Scientists at CERN's ACE project are studying antimatter as a potential candidate for cancer treatment. Doctors have already figured out that they can direct beams of particles at tumors that emit their energy only after they have safely passed through healthy tissue. Using antiprotons will add an extra burst of energy. This technique has been found to be effective in treating hamsters, but has yet to be tested on humans.

Antimatter may be lurking in space

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) is a particle detector located on the International Space Station that looks for such particles. The AMS contains magnetic fields that bend the path of cosmic particles and separate matter from antimatter. Its detectors must detect and identify such particles as they pass.

Collisions of cosmic rays usually produce positrons and antiprotons, but the probability of creating an antihelium atom remains extremely small due to the gigantic amount of energy required for this process. This means that the observation of just one nucleolus of antihelium would be powerful evidence for the existence of a gigantic amount of antimatter elsewhere in the universe.

People are actually learning how to power spacecraft with antimatter propellant

Rocket propulsion on antimatter is hypothetically possible; the main limitation is collecting enough antimatter to make this happen.

So far, there is no technology to mass-produce or collect antimatter in the volumes required for such an application. However, scientists are working on imitation of such movement and storage of this very antimatter. One day, if we find a way to produce large amounts of antimatter, their research could help make interstellar travel a reality.

Sourced from symmetrymagazine.org

Antimatter is matter composed entirely of antiparticles. In nature, every elementary particle has an antiparticle. For an electron, this will be a positron, and for a positively charged proton, it will be an antiproton. Atoms of ordinary matter - otherwise it is called coinsubstance They consist of a positively charged nucleus around which electrons move. And the negatively charged nuclei of antimatter atoms, in turn, are surrounded by antielectrons.

The forces that determine the structure of matter are the same for both particles and antiparticles. Simply put, the particles differ only in the sign of the charge. Characteristically, "antimatter" is not quite the right name. It is essentially just a kind of substance that has the same properties and is capable of creating attraction.

Annihilation

In fact, this is the process of collision of a positron and an electron. As a result, mutual annihilation (annihilation) of both particles occurs with the release of enormous energy. The annihilation of 1 gram of antimatter is equivalent to the explosion of a TNT charge of 10 kilotons!

Synthesis

In 1995, it was announced that the first nine atoms of antihydrogen had been synthesized. They lived for 40 nanoseconds and died, releasing energy. And already in 2002, the number of obtained atoms was in the hundreds. But all the resulting antiparticles could live only nanoseconds. Things changed with the launch of the Hadron Collider: it was possible to synthesize 38 antihydrogen atoms and hold them for a whole second. During this period of time, it became possible to conduct some studies of the structure of antimatter. They learned to hold particles after the creation of a special magnetic trap. In it, to achieve the desired effect, a very low temperature is created. True, such a trap is a very cumbersome, complicated and expensive matter.

In S. Snegov's trilogy "People are like gods", the annihilation process is used for intergalactic flights. The heroes of the novel, using it, turn stars and planets into dust. But in our time to obtain antimatter is much more difficult and expensive than to feed humanity.

How much does antimatter cost

One milligram of positrons should cost $25 billion. And for one gram of antihydrogen, you will have to pay 62.5 trillion dollars.

Such a generous person has not yet appeared that he could buy at least one hundredth of a gram. Several hundred million Swiss francs had to be paid for one billionth of a gram in order to obtain material for experimental work on the collision of particles and antiparticles. So far, there is no such substance in nature that would be more expensive than antimatter.

But with the question of the weight of antimatter, everything is quite simple. Since it differs from ordinary matter only in its charge, all other characteristics are the same. It turns out that one gram of antimatter will weigh exactly one gram.

World of antimatter

If we accept as true what was, then as a result of this process, an equal amount of both matter and antimatter should have arisen. So why don't we observe nearby objects consisting of antimatter? The answer is quite simple: two types of matter cannot coexist together. They will definitely cancel each other out. It is likely that galaxies and even antimatter universes exist. and we even see some of them. But they emit the same radiation, the same light comes from them, as from ordinary galaxies. Therefore, it is still impossible to say for sure whether there is an anti-world or whether this is a beautiful fairy tale.

Is it dangerous?

Mankind turned many useful discoveries into means of destruction. Antimatter in this sense cannot be an exception. A more powerful weapon than one based on the principle of annihilation cannot yet be imagined. Perhaps it's not so bad that so far it has not been possible to extract and preserve antimatter? Will it not be a fatal bell that humanity will hear on its last day?

Ecology of Cognition: Antimatter has long been the subject of science fiction. In the Angels & Demons book and movie, Professor Langdon tries to save the Vatican from an antimatter bomb. The Star Trek Enterprise spacecraft uses an engine based on

Antimatter has long been the subject of science fiction. In the Angels & Demons book and movie, Professor Langdon tries to save the Vatican from an antimatter bomb. The Star Trek spacecraft Enterprise uses an annihilating antimatter engine to travel faster than the speed of light. But antimatter is also the subject of our reality. Antimatter particles are virtually identical to their material counterparts, except that they carry opposite charge and spin. When antimatter meets matter, they instantly annihilate into energy, and this is no longer fiction.

Although antimatter bombs and ships based on the same fuel do not yet seem possible in practice, there are many facts about antimatter that will surprise you or allow you to brush up on what you already knew.

1 Antimatter Should Have Destroyed All Matter In The Universe After The Big Bang

According to the theory, the Big Bang created matter and antimatter in equal amounts. When they meet, there is mutual annihilation, annihilation, and only pure energy remains. Based on this, we should not exist.

But we exist. And as far as physicists know, this is because for every billion pairs of matter-antimatter there was one extra particle of matter. Physicists are trying their best to explain this asymmetry.

2 Antimatter Is Closer To You Than You Think

Small amounts of antimatter are constantly raining down on Earth in the form of cosmic rays, energetic particles from space. These antimatter particles reach our atmosphere at levels ranging from one to over a hundred per square meter. Scientists also have evidence that antimatter is produced during thunderstorms.

There are other sources of antimatter that are closer to us. Bananas, for example, generate antimatter by emitting one positron - the antimatter equivalent of an electron - about once every 75 minutes. This is because bananas contain small amounts of potassium-40, a naturally occurring isotope of potassium. The decay of potassium-40 sometimes produces a positron.

Our bodies also contain potassium-40, which means you emit positrons too. Antimatter annihilates instantly on contact with matter, so these antimatter particles don't live very long.

3 Humans Have Made Very Little Antimatter

The annihilation of antimatter and matter has the potential to release vast amounts of energy. A gram of antimatter can produce an explosion the size of a nuclear bomb. However, people have not produced much antimatter, so there is nothing to be afraid of.

All the antiprotons created at the Fermi Laboratory's Tevatron particle accelerator are barely 15 nanograms. At CERN, only about 1 nanogram has been produced to date. In DESY in Germany - no more than 2 nanograms of positrons.

If all the antimatter created by people annihilates instantly, its energy will not even be enough to boil a cup of tea.

The problem lies in the efficiency and cost of producing and storing antimatter. Creating 1 gram of antimatter requires about 25 million billion kilowatt-hours of energy and costs over a million billion dollars. Not surprisingly, antimatter is sometimes included in the list of the ten most expensive substances in our world.

4. There is such a thing as an antimatter trap.

To study antimatter, you need to prevent it from annihilating with matter. Scientists have found several ways to do this.

Charged particles of antimatter, like positrons and antiprotons, can be stored in so-called Penning traps. They are like tiny particle accelerators. Inside them, particles move in a spiral while magnetic and electric fields keep them from colliding with the walls of the trap.

However, Penning traps do not work for neutral particles like antihydrogen. Since they have no charge, these particles cannot be limited by electric fields. They are held in Ioffe traps that work by creating a region of space where the magnetic field gets stronger in all directions. Antimatter particles get stuck in the region with the weakest magnetic field.

The Earth's magnetic field can act as antimatter traps. Antiprotons have been found in certain zones around the Earth - the Van Allen radiation belts.

5. Antimatter can fall (literally)

Matter and antimatter particles have the same mass but differ in properties like electric charge and spin. The Standard Model predicts that gravity should have the same effect on matter and antimatter, but this remains to be seen for sure. Experiments like AEGIS, ALPHA and GBAR are working on this.

Observing the gravitational effect in antimatter is not as easy as watching an apple fall from a tree. These experiments require keeping antimatter trapped or slowing it down by cooling it to temperatures just above absolute zero. And since gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces, physicists must use neutral antimatter particles in these experiments to prevent interaction with the more powerful force of electricity.

6. Antimatter is being studied in particle moderators

Have you heard of particle accelerators, but have you heard of particle moderators? CERN has a machine called the Antiproton Decelerator, in which antiprotons are trapped and slowed down to study their properties and behavior.

In particle accelerator rings like the Large Hadron Collider, particles get an energetic boost each time they complete a circle. The moderators work in the opposite way: instead of dispersing the particles, they are pushed in the opposite direction.

7 Neutrinos Can Be Their Own Antiparticles

A particle of matter and its anti-material partner carry opposite charges, which makes it easy to distinguish between them. Neutrinos, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with matter, have no charge. Scientists believe they may be Majorana particles, a hypothetical class of particles that are their own antiparticles.

Projects like the Majorana Demonstrator and EXO-200 aim to determine whether neutrinos are indeed Majorana particles by observing the behavior of so-called neutrinoless double beta decay.

Some radioactive nuclei decay simultaneously, emitting two electrons and two neutrinos. If neutrinos were their own antiparticles, they would annihilate after a binary decay, and scientists would be left with only electrons to observe.

The search for Majorana neutrinos could help explain why there is a matter-antimatter asymmetry. Physicists suggest that Majorana neutrinos can be either heavy or light. The lungs exist in our time, and the heavy ones existed immediately after the Big Bang. Heavy Majorana neutrinos decayed asymmetrically, resulting in a tiny amount of matter that filled our Universe.

8 Antimatter Is Used In Medicine

PET, PET (Positron Emission Topography) uses positrons to produce high resolution images of the body. Positron-emitting radioactive isotopes (like the ones we found in bananas) attach to chemicals like glucose that are present in the body. They are injected into the bloodstream, where they naturally decay, emitting positrons. Those, in turn, meet the electrons of the body and annihilate. Annihilation produces gamma rays which are used to build the image.

Scientists at CERN's ACE project are studying antimatter as a potential candidate for cancer treatment. Doctors have already figured out that they can direct beams of particles at tumors that emit their energy only after they have safely passed through healthy tissue. Using antiprotons will add an extra burst of energy. This technique has been found to be effective in treating hamsters, but has yet to be tested on humans.

9 Antimatter Could Be Lurking In Space

One way scientists are trying to solve the matter-antimatter asymmetry problem is to look for antimatter left over from the Big Bang.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) is a particle detector located on the International Space Station that looks for such particles. The AMS contains magnetic fields that bend the path of cosmic particles and separate matter from antimatter. Its detectors must detect and identify such particles as they pass.

Collisions of cosmic rays usually produce positrons and antiprotons, but the probability of creating an antihelium atom remains extremely small due to the gigantic amount of energy required for this process. This means that the observation of just one nucleolus of antihelium would be powerful evidence for the existence of a gigantic amount of antimatter elsewhere in the universe.

10 People Are Actually Learning How To Power Spacecraft With Antimatter Fuel

Just a little bit of antimatter can produce massive amounts of energy, making it a popular fuel for futuristic science fiction ships.

Rocket propulsion on antimatter is hypothetically possible; the main limitation is collecting enough antimatter to make this happen.

So far, there is no technology to mass-produce or collect antimatter in the volumes required for such an application. However, scientists are working on imitation of such movement and storage of this very antimatter. One day, if we find a way to produce large amounts of antimatter, their research could help make interstellar travel a reality. published