The antiproton decelerator produces low energy antiprotons at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland. Credit: CERN
Our universe is full of particles, such as electrons and protons, which make up the whole things On our planet and beyond: animals, plants, people, planets, asteroids, stars, gas and galaxies clouds.
Antimatter It was discovered for the first time in 1928 by the physicist Paul Dirac, but it was not through any experiment. Instead, he was working to merge the theories of quantum mechanics with special relativity. When he finally discovered a relativistic version of quantum theory, he discovered that he naturally provided for the existence of antiparticles: particles with the same properties of normal matter, but having the opposite charge.
A few years later, in 1932, Carl D. Anderson produced the first anti-electrons, called Positrons, in the laboratory.
Today, laboratory experiments all over the world create and study antimatter. You’re probably familiar with the fact that these huge and complex structures are needed to do it. This is because for some reason, the universe in which we live is dominated by normal matter, making antimatter much rarer in everyday life.
Or is it?
It turns out that the universe produces antimatter on a regular basis, even if it still takes some work to do it.
Balance of nature
It turns out that almost all the interactions between the fundamental particles produce antimatter. This is because there is an important symmetry of nature known as the conservation of charges. It is not possible to add or subtract the electric charge from a process, therefore any total cost you are going must be the same exit. But since during interactions, particles can change identity and transform, sometimes antimatter must be formed to keep everything balanced. For example, the proton loaded positively can be transformed into a zero -dependent neutron, but the reaction must therefore also make a positron (positively loaded) to remain balanced.
Light can also create antimatter. A single piece of the single piece of electromagnetic-a sufficiently high energy radiation can convert spontaneously into an electrone-positive couple.
There is another much more prosaic source of antimatter in our daily life. You can also hold an antimatter generator in your hand. You just need a banana.
Bananas are rich in potassium, a vital nutrient. But there are many potassium isotopes, containing the same number of protons in their nucleus, but a different number of neutrons. One in particular, potassium-40, is radioactive, with an emeditus about 30 days. And when the potassium-40 decade naturally produces a positron as part of the process.
Short lives, above all
Despite their ease of creation, the antimatter particles do not stick for a long time. This is because when antimatter meets the regular question, both particles annihilate each other in a flash of energy equivalent to the masses of the particles involved. This actually makes the annualization of antimatter the most efficient source of the generation of energy, without any loss. If I could somehow collect only one gram of antimatter and react with a regular question, release the energy equivalent of a medium -sized atomic bomb.
There are countless annihilation events of this type throughout the cosmos every single second (also in your banana). Fortunately, they only involve a pair of particles of master antimatter skills at a time, and it is almost always a positron and electron, which are incredibly light, which means that these events are not destructive.
Practically every high energy reaction in the cosmos produces antimatter. This includes supernovae, active galactic nuclei (accumulating supermassichi black holes), star collisions and more. Due to the conservation of the charge, for each electron and created proton, a positron and an antiproton are born. Most of these antiparticles are quickly swallowed by the event that created them, breaking their normal counterparts and disappearing, but some manage to stream.
These antimatter particles become a small fraction of the largest population of cosmic rays, which are loaded particles that flow through the largest universe. Every second of each day, the antimatter particles affect the atmosphere of the earth, where they are immediately annihilated.
Imbalance of nature
The conservation of the accusation leads to a worrying problem: the fact that the universe observed is almost entirely composed of regular matter. If there were large pockets of antimatter-ad example, an entire galaxy made of antimatter-soeria we would have had to observe it promptly now, due to all the collisions for antimatter that occur at its borders.
However, we don’t see any test of antimatter on a large scale. This problem is known as Asimmetria Blyon – in the first universe, there must have been a physical process that broke the symmetry between matter and antimatter, violating the conservation of the charge and producing more matter of antimatter.
The imbalance was not to be much. For the total quantity of matter that we observe today in the universe, there was only an imbalance of about a part in a billion following the Big Bang. However, we have not known a widely accepted explanation as to why a small imbalance has also occurred. Presumably, the conditions in the young universe were so extreme that it broke all types of modern rules, including charge conservation, but we cannot yet understand how.
Bark’s asymmetry remains an exceptional problem in physics. In the meantime, antimatter – both made in the laboratory and in nature – provides fertile test soil for a wide variety of theories. Some changes to Einstein’s relativity provide that antimatter should try a slightly different gravitational shot, despite having the same mass as the normal question. So far no differences have been observed, which excludes many hypothetical ideas.
Scientists are even discussing if the neutrino, a small ghostly particle that almost never interacts with anything else, is its antiparticle. And since trillion of neutrinos pass through your body every second, this would mean that we are swimming in a sea of antimatter that – fortunately for us – we almost never interact.
Only more experiments – and more time – will answer these fundamental questions. So, stay tuned!
