Antimatter?

Dear reader, If you are reading about it for the first time or have just started to do some digging about it then congratulations! this article is perfect for you. It will tell you exactly what to look and where to look further.

What is Antimatter?

Have you ever observed that everything around us is symmetric? I mean everything exist in pairs. Day and night, yin and yang, Male and female, north and South Pole, truth and lies, the list is endless….. Everything we see around us has most likely an anti self. If we look at the bigger picture, the matter (which is literally everything around us) too has a lesser known anti-self called “antimatter”. Surprised? Well, you should if it was 1928, the year when Paul Dirac proposed its existence. He brilliantly pointed out that Einstein’s equation E=mc2 only consider mass “m” to be a positive entity. However he showed mathematically that mass too can exhibit negative properties. Hence the idea of antimatter was born. It took 4 more years until Carl Anderson discovered positron experimentally.

At the atomic level antimatter is just like matter but with opposite polarity. They have anti-proton (proton with negative charge) in place of proton and anti electron (called positron) in place of electron. These anti-subatomic particles when combined together create antimatter like anti-hydrogen, anti-oxygen and consequently anti-water and much more.

Okay, so you got the basic idea.

Why does it matter?

Now you might be thinking why antimatter? What’s the big deal about it? There is one word answers for that: annihilation. When anti matter comes in contact with matter it annihilates in accordance with the equation E=mc^2.Just imagine the amount of energy with just 1 kg of matter and antimatter? Put m=2 and square the value of c(3×108 m/s) in the above equation. That’s 1000 times more energy you can get from any nuclear fission!!Even with 200gms you can plan a return trip to Mars!(No wonder NASA is currently working on an antimatter engine).No fumes, no byproduct just pure energy. It’s the purest form of energy that we can lay our hands on.

So where is antimatter?

We don’t see it lying around some corner! Where is the symmetry we were talking about? According to physicists, during big bang tremendous amount of energy was released which should have condensed to give equal amount of antimatter and matter. This explanation was found to be in agreement with experimental results obtained. So the next big question is why we see only matter when both were created in equal amounts initially? This is the 2nd most debatable question on antimatter. The first one? Hang on a little bit. The ubiquity of matter over antimatter was first explained by Sarkharov. He suggested that antimatter particles might have decayed a little bit faster than their counterparts (For geeks it’s called CP violation). In simpler terms an imbalance existed between the amounts after Bing bang. This imbalance was of the order one billion one to one billion. So this extra ‘one’ created the leftovers that we see around us (stars, galaxies, us).

Another theory that attempts to explain the dominance of matter over anti matter is the “theory of regions”. According to this, antimatter does exist collectively in a far off region in the universe. The only problem is that we haven’t discovered that region yet. But again people question that if this is to be true then this antimatter region must begin from somewhere at its boundary where it has to come in contact with matter and emit γ-radiations. But we haven’t detected such radiation from any corner of universe yet. So sayonara to this theory for now!

So the conclusion is “we can’t find it therefore we can’t make it”. However, people who know about CERN would disagree with this statement because CERN is the world leader in synthesizing antimatter! Yes you heard it right, we have successfully synthesized antimatter (or more precisely anti atom) in our labs.

How do they make it?

Remember the equation E=mc^2? Scientist thought that if mass can be used to create tremendous amount of energy then maybe condensing tremendous amount of energy may lead us mass! It’s like hammering zero to get 1 and -1 Or solving x2=4 to get -2 and 2 as solutions. The sun in fact produces large amount of antimatter naturally everyday due to its high energy density.

Method used by CERN involves accelerating protons through a 12.7km long underground tunnel during which they gain energy equivalent to 2.7GeV and are bombarded on heavy elements like lead.

Heavy elements have heavy nucleus that means they experience Strong repulsive force from protons present in nucleus. This leads to change in their trajectory, change in their velocity causing acceleration. This causes change in their energy level hence emitting anti protons along with some other subatomic particles. This is how you make anti particles.

And if you want to make antiparticles at your home without having going through the trouble of hiring the CERN for one day, I have something for you. A banana! Yes it’s a radioactive food and it decays periodically to give positron (anti-electron).You might not beat CERN with it but at least you can brag about it to your neighbors! Believe me antimatter is currently the most expensive thing on the planet with its 1mg costing around $100 billion!

Ever wondered how you would trap antimatter?

A container used for storing antimatter will itself be made of matter, so they’ll love to annihilate each other. This might sound a bit disappointing but if we collect all the antimatter produced at CERN till this date it would be just enough for lighting a bulb for few seconds. We get nearly 1billionth of energy required to produce antimatter.

Antimatter in everyday life

It might come as surprise that apart from being a potential rocket fuel and deadliest weapon till date antimatter is quite famous in medical industry. Curing cancer by bombarding anti proton on target cells to live imaging of internal organs using positron emission tomography (PET), antimatter fits almost everywhere.

But the real problem is that we don’t know enough of it. What we have known till today came from experimental data only. We don’t know whether it will fall upwards or downwards (This is the most debatable question on antimatter) or how to stabilize heavier anti-elements. A concrete theory is what we need to accelerate our progress in this field. I believe that few years from now we will have that theory because it is the solution of one of the major global problem of 21st century: Energy crisis

Thanks for reading!

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