Smooshing them together is a really delicate business. Hangst and his team slow those antiprotons down and then combine them with antielectrons. Physicists use a giant particle accelerator at a big lab called CERN to make antiprotons, which are the antiversion (ph) of protons, which make up the hearts of atoms. HANGST: It's really just annoying to have to deal with something that you have to make and that the universe is trying to destroy (laughter) at every turning point.īRUMFIEL: Producing even a handful of atoms of antimatter is tough. JAMES DOOHAN: (As Montgomery "Scotty" Scott) Antimatter pods are rigged to blow up the moment we go into warp drive.īRUMFIEL: But in real life, the fact that matter and antimatter can't coexist is just, well. It all makes for some great episodes of "Star Trek." Physicists can routinely measure this in the lab - negative electrons meeting positively charged antielectrons and disappearing in a flash. That's where the science fiction stuff comes in.īRUMFIEL: If matter and antimatter touch, they annihilate, turning into pure energy. HANGST: The antimatter matter can't exist in the presence of matter. And just like a bad movie, the twins can't meet. Every type of particle in the universe has an opposite with opposite properties. JEFFREY HANGST: Antimatter - I think of it as kind of an evil twin of the stuff that makes up our everyday world.īRUMFIEL: Jeffrey Hangst is a physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark. GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: You, me, your radio or smart speaker or whatever - it's all regular, old matter. As NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports, antimatter is extremely rare, and researchers want to know why. To make one full gram (approximately 0.035 ounces) of the antiproton, scientists will need to continue their production at the current rate for another 6x10^8 years, and it will cost them a whopping 2.Physicists in Switzerland reported today that they'd conducted fresh experiments on antimatter. CERN produces about 1x10^15 antiprotons every year, but that only amounts to 1.67 nanograms. For the past a few years, scientists at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) have been producing antihydrogen by slowing downing high energy antiprotons and smashing them into positrons.ĭue to its explosive nature (it annihilates when in contact with normal matter) and energy-intensive production, the cost of making antimatter is astronomical. It has the same mass and spin as an electron, but a charge of +1 instead of -1.Īntiparticles (such as positrons and antiprotons) can bind with each other to form antimatter (such as antihydrogen), just as ordinary particles bind to form normal matter. For example, a positron is the antimatter equivalent of an electron. In physics, antimatter is defined as the counterpart of normal matter, with the same mass but opposite electric charge. Scientists suspect that the reason behind this imbalance may lie in antimatter itself. Thank goodness that was not the case, and our world is dominated with normal matter. Physicists have long theorized that our world shouldn't have existed, because the equal amount of matter and antimatter created during the toddlerhood of our universe should have annihilated with each other, leaving almost nothing behind.
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