Does antimatter matter revisited
By Brian Clegg
REVISIT SERIES
When I was a teenager and ill I used to revert to childhood reading – Famous Five and the like. Recently confined to bed with norovirus, I found that all my brain could cope with was guff such as the output of Dan Brown, so I gritted my teeth and read Angels and Demons. As always with Brown, most of the ‘fact’ content of the book was pure fiction. However, I thought it would be worth a quick trip into the nature of the central MacGuffin of the story, antimatter. It may be Brown’s super bomb and the power source of the fictional USS Enterprise, but it is real.
Antimatter is like the familiar stuff that makes up our world, but charged particles have the opposite charge (it’s a little more complicated with uncharged particles). Instead of negative electrons, antimatter has positive anti-electrons, better known as positrons. In the image above you see the first detected positron (detected by Carl Anderson in 1932, and predicted by Paul Dirac in 1928). It’s the curved line, which would have the opposite curvature if it had been an electron.
The simplest reaction between the two is when an electron and a positron combine. The mass of the particles is converted into energy in the form of two photons of light (gamma rays), the amount predicted by Einstein’s famous equation E=mc2 – the energy produced is equal to the combined mass of the particles multiplied by the square of the speed of light. Because of this tendency to annihilate, very little free antimatter is found in the universe – at least anywhere we can see.
There is still a debate about where all the antimatter has gone. The Big Bang, starting with pure energy, should have produced equal amounts of matter and anti-matter, which then could wipe each other out, reverting to a universe full of energy. That this didn’t happen is usually explained by assuming that subtle differences in the properties of matter and anti-matter meant that there was a little extra matter left over. As few as one particle in a billion may have survived the initial matter/anti-matter wipe-out. But that was enough. However, this story is speculative at best.
The amount of energy generated from the interaction of matter and antimatter is vast. One kilogram of matter/antimatter coming together would produce around 1017 joules (1 with seventeen 0’s after it). That’s the energy output of a decent sized power station running for six years. However, don’t expect, as Dan Brown appears to think, that antimatter is a new and wonderful power source. It’s just a way to store energy – and it takes vastly more energy to make the antimatter than is released when it annihilates. It’s not a source of energy in the way a fuel in the way that sunlight or gas or radioactive materials are – instead it’s more like a battery where you can store a vast amount of energy in a very small space. It’s a battery with serious attitude.
Image of first discovered antimatter particle track from Wikipedia
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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.
Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2026/08/does-antimatter-matter-revisited.html
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