Antimatter

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PaulaJedi

Rift Surfer
Discuss everything anti-matter here! I am new to this topic, so I'm just going to be the catalyst to get this conversation started and I will probably ask questions as people kindly discuss.

According to CERN, every particle has a "corresponding antiparticle" with an opposite charge. They state that every electron should have a corresponding "antielectron" as well. (I am not sure why they are using the word 'should' unless they are unsure). This is basically where matter an antimatter come from. The article in the link below suggests there could be entire galaxies made of antimatter. Again, 'could', so this appears to be a theory. They also question why there appears to be more antimatter in the universe.

Do you believe there is more antimatter? Why? Let's discuss.

http://home.web.cern.ch/topics/antimatter

 
It's actually Paul Dirac in 1928 who stated that every particle has an antimatter equivalent. The Dirac Equation is the basis for the Standard Model of particle physics.

We don't know for sure why matter in the observable universe dominates antimatter. The best theory involves the weak force interaction and CP symmetry violation at the time of the Big Bang. The weak force determines the color and flavor of quarks/anti-quarks in QCD Theory.

It appears that in the early universe during the Big Bang matter and antimatter should have been created in equal parts but at the time the laws of physics slightly favored matter creation over antimatter creation. After all the annihilation events had occurred we were left with a tiny trace of pollution...what we call matter. Almost all matter/antimatter would have been converted to energy. When we look at the sky that's what we see. It's a huge vacuum with a bit of matter here and there forming star clusters and a lot of "cold" photons (cosmic background radiation - the echo of the Big Bang).

Are there other regions of the universe that are antimatter? It's possible but not likely. We don't have a complete theory to describe how matter dominated antimatter so it leaves the question open. But there should be some evidence in the sky and we don't see it. If a matter and antimatter galaxy were in the same vicinity we should see some pretty violent action. So if they exist they must be beyond our event horizon (too far away for their light to have reached us).

If there were regions of the universe that are antimatter what would they be like? They'd be exactly like it is here. There's nothing special about antimatter. The term is arbitrary. In the antimatter universe they would call our matter "antimatter." Atoms made from antimatter work just fine in antimatter chemistry and physics. That's basically the definition of CP Symmetry - swap out every particle with its anti-particle twin and the laws of physics remain unchanged.

 
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