Matter's evil twin - Antimatter

Hello, fellow steemians. A couple of years back, I came across a novel by Dan Brown titled Angels and Demons. You might have read it… or not. But you would have heard of the movie which starred Tom Hanks.

At the beginning of the book, some facts about something called “antimatter” (didn't know what that was at the time) was stated therein. Some of the facts were quite intriguing as you would come to find out. It turned out playing a very important role in the story.

That book was my first encounter with the word. I can remember obsessively researching it then as only a Dan Brown book would make you. So what is antimatter?

Antimatter

As you would probably know, a lot of things that have positives, have an equal negative ‘thing’ for it. So it's only logical to expect that matter which we are made of, which we breathe and which we stand on, has an evil identical twin - antimatter. Just kidding about the evil part… Or maybe not.

Almost everything in the universe is made out of matter. The earth, the air, the stars, the moon, all matter. If it has a mass, then you can safely regard it as matter.

Matter as we know it is made up of other fundamental particles like quarks u, d, c, t, b, s, neutrinos Ve, Vm, Vt, muons and others like that. All these elementary particles are matter.

But matter also has an equal but opposite twin called antimatter. So we have antiquarks, antineutrinos, antielectron(they're called positrons) antimuons, etc. They're the exact same thing as their twin but have opposite charges.

Matter was created when the big bang occurred about 13.8 billion years ago. And as you would have guessed, so was antimatter. Because of the opposite charge of antimatter, when I get close to an anti-me(I wonder what he'd be like), we cancel out in a burst of energy. By cancel out, I mean poof! Gone. No more @quantum-wave.

Same goes for any other form of matter. When they come together with their negative twin, they annihilate each other and give off energy in the form of gamma rays. Talk about twins that can never touch!

Theoretically, when the big bang occurred, it should have given off equal amounts of matter and antimatter, considering they're both essentially the same thing except having different charges.

_{Artist's rendering of the Big Bang - Pixabay CC0 Creative Commons}

But that didn't happen. The universe exists right? So based on this, it has been theorized by cosmologists that more matter was produced than antimatter. Not a large amount by the way( for every 1 billion matter and antimatter, there's an extra one matter), but just enough to form the universe we now live in. That is still a lot of matter. The process that developed the inequality between matter and antimatter is called baryogenesis.

But scientists are still baffled as to why there was more matter than antimatter during the big bang. As for me, I'm just thankful that's the way it was.

Creating Antimatter

In order to understand the mystery behind the small amount of antimatter in the universe, scientists set about creating antimatter here on earth, specifically antihydrogen to study it. But wait a second, if antimatter annihilates when it comes in contact with matter how would the antihydrogen created be stored?

Well, first a vacuum is needed to prevent the antihydrogen from coming in contact with air which is matter. Then one needs to make sure the antihydrogen is kept from the sides of the container holding it as that’s also made of matter.

The solution scientist came up with which met with these requirements was a kind of ‘magnetic bottle(it's more like a bathtub actually) that uses magnetic and electric fields to keep the antihydrogen from annihilating. Cool.

But to trap antihydrogen, it still has to be created first. The challenge with this, usually, is to get a positron(antielectron) and an antiproton close enough to each other to get their electric fields to pull them together to form antihydrogen.

If you can remember some of your high school physics (or chemistry), hydrogen is made up of a positively charged proton, and a negatively charged electron orbiting the proton. The attraction created by the opposing charges prevents the electron from flying out. So antihydrogen consists of just the direct opposite.

This has already been achieved by the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire(CERN) or the European Organization for Nuclear Research as it is known in English. They did this by slowing down antiprotons(they usually contain a lot of energy, and hence move very fast) in a machine called an antiproton decelerator. Apt if you ask me. Oh, you didn't. Alright.

_{European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Switzerland - Wikipedia Public domain}

Electric and magnetic forces then do the job of bringing the antiproton and positron together to produce antihydrogen. By the way, positrons are gotten from radioactive salts which releases them naturally when they decay, while the antiproton is gotten from protons through a series of steps. More on that here.

Natural Occurences

Aside creating antimatter through the complex processes you've read above, antimatter particles also appear naturally on earth.

Positrons as I mentioned earlier, are produced when certain radioactive salts like Potassium-40 decay. Antineutrinos which are also antimatter particle are products of the decay of radioactive salts.

When high energy cosmic rays hit the earth's atmosphere, antimatter particles are also produced. But the amount produced is very small and does not last long as it reacts with matter around it and annihilates.

Antimatter particles - specifically positron - are also produced during thunderstorms. Gamma-ray flashes resulting from the acceleration of electrons by strong electric fields are responsible for its production.

Uses of Antimatter

So we've gone through my hopefully not boring explanation of what antimatter is and why as humans we even care to research it. Now you're probably wondering if it even has any use considering so much money is spent trying to produce them.

Well as a matter of fact they do. Some are potential uses, while some are being applied. So let's see what they're potentially useful for.

Remember at the beginning of this article when I talked about a book I read. Turns out antimatter was used as a bomb in it. You've probably already guessed how such a bomb would work. Because of the reaction of antimatter against matter, all that's needed is a sufficient amount of antimatter, and we've gotten ourselves a bomb...Not really. A couple of other things would still be needed to control its detonation.

A bomb made out of a gram of antimatter would cause an explosion twice that of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear explosion combined. This would easily wipe out a whole city. An antimatter bomb would be able to achieve this because when it reacts with matter, it does so with a 100% release of pure energy compared to nuclear weapons that are only able to convert 7-10% of their fuel mass to energy.

It could also be made use of in smaller scale assassination, as in the theorized antimatter bullet which would have a billionth of a gram of antimatter attached to the tip. This, when fired from a rifle could destroy a tank or a house or anything similar in size.

It could potentially serve as a fuel source for various machines like vehicles, power plants etc. It could also be used as a fuel source for interstellar travel. It's been estimated to quite possibly propel a space shuttle with humans on it with a speed half that of light. That's fast enough to get us to the nearest star to us in about two years. Must be one hell of a distance if it still takes that long.

Antiprotons have also been shown in a lot of studies to potentially cure certain types of cancer.

So why haven't we been able to achieve all this? Well, the thing is producing antimatter isn't so easy. The Large Hadron Collider operated by CERN is able to cough out about 10 million protons per minute when fully operational. Now that probably sounds like a lot.

_{European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) Switzerland - Wikipedia Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.}

But at that rate, it'd take CERN about 100 billion years to produce just a gram! I'm pretty sure everyone would be dead by then. Even if we find a way of producing it, there's still the issue of storing it. As you already know, it can't be stored in a container made of matter.

But I really do hope all these challenges are surmounted. Antimatter as a fuel source is something I'm looking forward to. What about you? Which of its potential uses do you find the most interesting? Let me know in the comment section below.

Thanks for reading, see you later. Auf wiedersehen.

PS: Your body is producing antimatter particles right now from the radioactive decay of potassium-40 in your body system! It's not harmful though, fret not.

REFERENCES

• Antimatter - Wikipedia.
• Making Antimatter.
• How can we make Antimatter.
• How to make Antiprotons.
• What Is Antimatter And Why Are We Searching For It?
• Antimatter explained.

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