Does antimatter exist?

• In science fiction, antimatter powers warp engines to allow faster-than-light space travel

• And makes a fearsome weapon to destroy the Vatican in Angels & Demons

• Antimatter definitely exists• And they really do make tiny

amounts of it at CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider

• Every type of particle of matter has an antimatter counterpart

• They are identical mirror-images, apart from having opposite charges

• For electrons there are positrons, and protons have antiprotons…

• If you put a positron and an antiproton together you get a molecule of anti-hydrogen

• This is what they can make at CERN

• Antimatter is very tricky to handle, because matter and antimatter just don’t get on

• When an antimatter particle touches a matter particle they are both wiped out in a flash of energy

• At CERN they can only keep positrons and antiprotons briefly in an elaborate magnetic trap

[Google]

• When the universe began in the Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created

• But now there is no antimatter left that we can find, anywhere

• So the real question is: where did it go?

[CERN]

• One of the four huge experiments at the LHC, the LHCb, records what happens when protons collide with enough energy to create pairs of matter and antimatter quarks

• The LHCb scientists are trying to find any tiny difference between them that could explain why matter got the upper hand over antimatter at the beginning of the universe

[CERN]

• There’s no chance of making an antimatter bomb, though

• It takes way more energy to make mere particles of the antimatter than you get out when it’s annihilated with matter!

• Not really. In 10 years, CERN has made just about a billionth of a gram of antimatter

• Enough to power a light bulb for a few minutes

[CERN]

• Click on the link below to view the science facts and fiction of Angels & Demons a book by Dan Brown

• Click on the image or the link below to view a video short called Hunting Beauty

http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Content/Chapters/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html

http://labreporter.com/labreports.html