Contrary of Matter

Najmin Sultana

BSc 3^rd Sem (Physics Major)

Have you ever imagine on the palm of your hands such a power that could explode a city with just the use of few grams of such a new and exotic kind atoms called ‘antimatter’.

Antimatter was first predicted in 1928 by physicist Paul Dirac. Dirac put together Einstein’s special relativity equation and quantum mechanics and he discovered the equation worked for electrons with negative charge or with positive charges.

Antimatter is the heart of one of the biggest conundrum in physics. Basically, antimatter is the opposite of normal matter. More specifically, antimatter is a material composed of so called ‘anti-particles’. Physicist believe that every particle has an antimatter companion that is virtually identical to itself but with opposite charge. For example, in the heart of an atom, called nucleus, are protons, which have a neutral charge. Electrons, which generally have a negative charge, but reversed relative to matter. Anti-electrons are called are positrons behave like electrons but have positive charge. Anti-protons, as the name implies, are protons with a negative charge. When a particle and its anti-particles meet, they annihilate each other leaving nothing but energy behind.

This antimatter particles (which are called anti-particles) have been generated an situated at huge particles accelerator such as the ‘Large Hadron Collider’ operated by CERN (The European Organisation For Nuclear Research).In 1995 (Towards the end of the year) , the such anti-atoms were produced at CERN by a team of German and Italian physicists. Although only 9 anti-atoms were made, but it has opened the door to the systematic exploration of the anti-world. But the problem lies in the efficiency and cost of anti-matter production and storage. Making 1g of anti-matter would required approximately 25 Million billion KW hour of energy and cost over a million billion dollars.

Physicists predict that matter and antimatter must be created in almost equal quantities and this would have been the case during the ‘Big-Bang’. It is predicted that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle is interchanged with its anti-particles a relationship known as ‘CP symmetry’. However the Universe doesn’t seem to obey the rule it is almost entirely made of matter. So, a question may arise why the observable Universe has more matter than anti-matter; if they were created in equal amounts than where did all the anti-matter go?

In the past few decades, particles-physics experiments have shown that the laws of nature do not apply equally to matter and anti-matters. Researchers have observed spontaneous transformation between particles and there antiparticles, occurring millions of times per second before they decay. Some unknown entity intervening in this process in the early universe could have cause these “oscillating” particles to decay as matter more often then they decayed as antimatter.

However, a great many mysteries remain. Experiments are also investigating whether the gravity affect antimatter. If these exact symmetries are shown to be broken, it will require a fundamental revision of our ideas about physics, affecting not only particle physics but also our understanding of gravity and relativity. Who knows what we will find?