This is considered by many as the big Kahuna of the science fiction world. There have been multiple ideas of anti- this and that and the general consensus is that anti- anything means bad. Bad for me, bad for you, bad for everybody. This is because of a concept called matter-antimatter annihilation:
More aptly put:
What if I then told you that one of your favorite fruits is constantly emitting anti matter? That’s right, those bananas are beckoning your demise! And so are… you?! Yeah, you too. The antimatter produced from bananas is in the form of a positron emission. This occurs when an isotope has more neutrons than necessary. Bananas contain trace amounts of an isotope of Potassium, Potassium-40. We do too. Now, judging from the pictures above, one would assume that there is something missing. Why don’t we all blow up like example 2 above whenever we peel a banana? A relatively large amount of antimatter is needed to provide enough energy for something like an antimatter bomb shown in example 2. Antimatter is actually somewhat rare and any processes that produce it right now produce very minuscule amounts. It’s also super costly to produce.
So now on to the real info you’ve been waiting for, what is this stuff anyway? Anti- means not so is it just not matter? Well, no. Antimatter shares many of the properties of real matter, including that antimatter has equivalent mass. What’s different is more or less the identity which includes a difference of charge as well as spin. These properties of each other are complimentary and this causes the reaction as it is much like the sum of +1 and -1. Though the magnitudes of the two are the same, they are inherently different allowing them to cancel each other out.
I won’t get too much into it, but antimatter also has a significant role to play in the whole Big Bang theory. Generally speaking, as matter was spontaneously created during the big bang, as would have been antimatter. Following the general equation, there should have been equal parts of the antimatter and the matter. As each piece of antimatter would interact with a corresponding single piece of matter. There would not have been any matter left over after the reaction. This means that we would not exist nonetheless be thinking about antimatter.
In order to create antimatter, you need to be able to first have something that would release cosmic energy. Second, you badly need a lot of money because these min-prep units are small and very expensive. Third, you need some miraculous ways of containing the radioactive material so that the antimatter does not leave the container and more antimatter can accumulate. There are a couple of things can be used to store the antimatter:
- Penning Traps
- These work akin to an accelerator with the spin due to electromagnetic fields causing the material to become a concentrated substance.
- Loffe traps
- These focus on keeping the particle busy as well. By keeping the particle inside of an area with ever-increasing magnetic field in every direction, the antimatter is forced to come to a rest/ move around within the area.
Well, that’s all for antimatter folks! Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. If you have a request for an explanation. I will do my best to answer it!
See, I knew bananas were the worst fruit!
I must say that I go into these blog posts with at least 0% of previous knowledge to your topics, which is why I really enjoy them. They are very informative and provide a comprehensible amount of information unlike many other sources which leave me puzzled after reading them. These topics are something I’d typically shy away from because I’m not very fluent in the world of science. However, you do a great job of keeping my interest.
Great post! When it comes to science, I am far from adequate and don’t know much about it at all. The way you wrote about anti matter made it really clear about what it was and how it exists in our world. I like how you talked about what anti matter means to us and how it makes sense that a banana doesn’t explode after peeling it. I really liked how even with a serious topic you were able to contribute some humor and present your personality. Keep up the great work!
Awesome post! I liked the humor with which you introduced the topic. I consider myself decently well read in the ways of science, but I actually had never heard about the banana positrons, so I thought it was a funny fun fact. Good job bringing it around to an explanation of anti matter itself. Of course it is hard to really explain something which was only able to be discovered recently by physicists in a short blog post, but I think you do a good enough job of containing the main idea within your explanation. Part of me feels like I want to know more about it, because there is clearly so much to be said about it, ranging from the science to the politics behind it, but I guess that’s the point of the blog!