You may have heard of a "PET scan" used in medicine. This uses a type of antimatter called a positron.
Just wait until you find out about MRI :)
Does it matter?
Bananas produce antimatter, but just barely. The main radioactive material in bananas is Potassium-40. A banana is about 0.358% potassium in all. About 0.012% of naturally occurring potassium is the radioactive Potassium-40. Only 0.001% of all radioactive decay events in postassium-40 produce an antiparticle (a positron).
An average banana produces a single positron about every 75 minutes.
Brb. Making a fruit-based matter-antimatter annihilation power plant.
You kid but as a kid when I learned about potatoes and lemon batteries I was like "SCALE THIS UP NOW!"
...if only...
We need a Far Side where ape scientists are colliding two bannanas at high speed
Antimatter was first observed physically back in 1932. A positron, more specifically. Its existence has been confirmed, and accepted, for ages, and some of our technology already operates using antimatter to do its tasks.
anti-matter? ya, we have been observing it for quite a while (testing is difficult for reasons), it naturally accumulates in parts of the Van Allen belt.
Dark matter on the other hand is still completely up for question
The Large Hadron Collider wouldn't work if antimatter wasn't confirmed.
Because it involves colliding protons and antiprotons.
No, it either does proton-proton collisions or heavy ions, both regular matter. At TeV energies the added energy from anihalating matter with antimatter isn't that much of a contribution anymore that it would justify the added complexity.
Its predecessor collided positrons with electrons though. But the LEP was more for precise refinement of known interactions and not so much about reaching the highest possible energies.
The reason antimatter is "anti" is that an antiparticle has the opposite charge of its non-anti counterpart. Electrons have a negative charge, while their antiparticles, positrons have a positive charge. And since opposite charges attract, well, I think you can figure it out from there.
And yes, matter/antimatter interactions result in annihilation.
What exactly does "annihilation" mean in this context. Do both "atoms" give off energy and convert to sub atomic particles? Does one atom kind of "win" over the other and undergo fission instead of complete annihilation?
At this tiny scale, energy and mass are essentially equivalent. So when we say that matter annihilates, we mean that they transform into pure energy (in this case, as photons of light). They don't break into subatomic particles, because that still counts as mass. They just simply cease to exist.
As a side note, the "conversion rate" of mass into energy (and vice versa) is governed by Einstein's E=mc^2. All this equation means is that it takes a ridiculous amount of energy to create a small amount of mass, and vice versa, it only takes a small amount of mass to create a ridiculous amount of energy. Because antimatter annihilates completely (ie, 100% of its mass, as well as 100% of the regular matter's mass, gets converted into energy), antimatter is currently the most explosive thing known to mankind
Ok that makes sense.
Man that's pretty wild to think about. If antimatter was created at the same time as matter in the same quantity and distribution, then why are we here. Why didn't the entire universe essentially cancel itself out? Was there some factor that benefited regular matter or hindered antimatter? Is there some level of chaos on the atomic or subatomic scale that played in regular matter being the dominant? Has some crazy philosophical implications.
If I understand it correctly, annihilation is a 100% efficient process that converts all the matter into energy. After the process is complete there is no matter left over and only energy in the form of light, heat, and other energy forms that go way over my head remains.
Annihilation means exactly that - both particles destroy each other on contact, releasing the energy that composed them.
For the simple case of electron-positron annihilation, they transform into high-energy photons, whose total energy is equal to the total mass-energy of the electron and positron. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/...
While atoms can be comprised of antimatter the interactions are generally on a subatomic level, i.e. electron/positron, and proton/antiproton. Since particles/antiparticles are identical to their counterparts aside from charge any such interactions are total with nothing left over other than the resulting energy release usually in the form of photons. The results of an atom reacting with an anti-atom could have a variety of results depending on the differences in weight between the two. Exactly what those results might be is a bit beyond my lay-understanding of the process.
In my limited understanding, antimatter just means the particles have the opposite charge of normal matter. All other attributes are not part of the definition of antimatter.
No, charge is the right word. But i was wrong about charge being the only difference, apparently antimatter's "parity" and "time" are also opposite of normal matter. Whatever that means.
The word is charge-parity. All physical systems (at least I'm quantum physics, I cant speak for other fields) are symmetric (nothing changes) if you change C(harge), P(arity) and T(ime reversal) at the same time. This is called CPT symmetry, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPT_symmetry
As antimatter can be described as normal matter going back in time (see the other comment), it means antimatter can also be described as normal matter transformed under the C and P operators. If T(particle) = antiparticle and CPT(particle) = particle then CP(particle) = antiparticle also.
And the reason you can reverse time is because most of the equations are quadratic: they have a positive and negative solution, one describes particles moving forward in time, the other solution describes antiparticles going backward in time.
NB: in quantum field theory it gets slightly more complicated, lets leave that as homework ;)
The Feynman–Stueckelberg interpretation states that antimatter and antiparticles are regular particles traveling backward in time.[18]
So just like in Tenet?
Because there is no theory of quantum gravity we have no idea how gravity could interact with anti matter. By showing that antimatter behaves just like matter when interacting with gravity we can learn a lot about it and cut the number of possible theories of quantum gravity in half.
Because one common assumption was that the universe might contain as much antimatter as matter.
Which begs the question: Where did it go? We would notice a huge amount of annihilation reactions in the solar system.
"Antimatter falls up" (is gravitationally repelled instead of attracted by normal matter) was an easy hypothesis to explain that.
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@lemmy.world
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind
go to feed...
Huh I didn't know antimatter was a completely confirmed thing.
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