MATTER and ANTIMATTER

Many people have been introduced to the concept of antimatter by reading Dan Brown`s novel Angels and Demons or by seeing the Startrek series on the tv in which space travel is possible by antimatter propulsion. Many people wonder if there is any such thing as antimatter, and whether it can indeed be harnessed by the human race. We are on the verge of space exploration but the distances are so enormous that man will never set foot on the distant worlds unless some new form of energy enabling vast distances to be covered well within a human lifetime is discovered and made usable. The following essay attempts to answer these questions.

Section One

In September, 2002, American newspapers presented headlines about European physicists achieving a major breakthrough in a long struggle to understand a very strange and mysterious substance : antimatter, which permeates the universe, and which is so called because it is like a mirror image of ordinary matter. These scientists had succeeded in creating anti atoms , the looking glass cousins of normal atoms . In particular, anti-atoms of hydrogen , the substance that largely powers the sun, but which may be better known to us as the means of inter-stellar propulsion in the tv series ,Star Trek. In hydrogen, , the simplest element, a negatively charged electron orbits a proton nucleus ; but in an antihydrogen atom a positively charged particle - a positron - orbits an antiproton nucleus.. Anti-matter , like ordinary matter is composed of electrons and protons but with an electrical charge.. An normal electron has a negative electrical charge, while protons are positively charged. In anti-matter charges are reversed Protons make up the nucleus of the hydrogen atom and have an electrical charge equal and opposite to that of the electron . A positron is the name given to an electron`s anti-matter counterpart.

Matter and anti-matter are antipathetic; in other words, if they collide , they annihilate each other in a burst of tremendous energy. Harnessing this energy would revolutionise life on earth and in space.. The atom bomb is a minor instance of this but for destructive purposes. Summing up, matter that occupies space consists of atoms and subatomic particles called protons, neutrons and electrons. For each basic particle , there is a corresponding antiparticle. A neutron is a particle that is neutral electronically and with the same mass as a proton.

First of all, a little bit of history! In 1928 , a British physicist, Paul Dirac, formulated a theory for the motion of electrons in electric and magnetic fields. These theories included some of Einstein`s work on the Theory of Relativity, and led Dirac to discover many attributes of electron motion that previous study could not. His theory led to the prediction that the electron must have an antiparticle but which had a positive charge. All particle research since then has resulted from Dirac`s breakthrough. Of great moment is the fact that thousands of atoms made entirely of antimatter had been produced. This alone gave the world the message that limitless energy might indeed open up to us, from domestic use (mainly in medical contexts) to space exploration. Not only this, but the discovery of the properties of antimatter .might also give insights into the beginnings of the universe. Nothing could have been more exciting at the time. The point about antimatter is that it is impossible to tell the difference by looking between it and its twin, regular matter. The only difference is, as stated above, that antimatter has an opposite

electrical charge to normal matter. We have stated that enormous amounts of energy are generated by annihilation when antimatter and matter come into contact, giving rise to fears of danger, but small amounts are not dangerous. Much of the development of research in this field is undertaken by the European Centre for Nuclear Research , , known by its (French) acronym of CERN, in Switzerland. At immensely high speeds , protons are accelerated which results in the creation of both matter and antimatter particles. Millions of accelerated protons are needed to

produce one particle of antimatter. But millions are accelerated.The problem is that the atoms of hydrogen so produced have a very short life indeed, millions of a second. And they move at great speeds! - making their study very difficult. How to slow then down? The scientist built a machine to do just this and enabled them to study the elusive antiatoms.

The holy grail of sub-atomic research lies in resolving the puzzle of why the (our) universe is seemingly made up of matter rather than of antimatter since our understanding of the orgins of the universe lead us to think that it (the universe) should be made up of equal amounts of matter and antimatter. (It was providential that this was not so as a mix of antimatter particles and regular matter particles would have resulted in the complete annihilation of all matter and subsequent life would have been out of the question). What happened as far as we can tell, was that indeed matter and antimatter were created equally , but for some (so far) unknown reason one particle of matter extra, was produced and this remained over as it were after the process of

annihilation (matter versus antimatter) out of which the universe was formed. Clearly, there was some sort of imbalance in that first millisecond at the dawn of creation. We do not know why but the breakthrough at CERN may result in an explanation as research continues into the behaviour of antimatter.

Section two Research into atomic particles has therefore great implications for the future. For example the harnessing of antimatter would mean that space exploration to distant worlds would be possible. A gram of antimatter would enable the journey to Mars, for example, to be made in about two weeks instead of two years as at present. As stated, when matter particles come into contact with antimatter particles , they annihilate each other and loose energy that is millions of times greater than that produced by conventional combustion or explosion. However. as we have

seen, antimatter is created with great difficulty and is even more difficult to keep, because of its volatility. Producing and storing a gram of antimatter is the present goal, and to put this in context we need to know that the world`s largest maker of antimatter (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory) makes only a fraction of a gram a year. At that rate it would take about a million years (for now!) to produce a gram, and this would not be anywhere near enough to power a spacecraft.

By contrast, antimatter is being used now to treat diseases, and will do more so in the future. At the moment , its application is more widely seen in medical imaging systems. (for diagnoses). It could for example. kill cancerous tumors. The process is explained by realising that when a proton meets an antiproton it will produce a lot more energy to the tissue under examination than conventional methods. At low energies annihilations (between electron and positron) are put to medical uses, to reveal, for example, workings of the brain, by means of the technique known as Positron Emission Tomography (PET). Hence the headline seen in summer, 2005, Grey matter made visible with invisible antimatter. The process is too involved to go into here, but the nub of it is that gamma rays are produced which can be detected and used to build up an image of the organ being investigated, while the patient is still conscious. This may lead to cures for such as Parkinson`s disease and the alleviation of Alzeimers disease. The use of PET means that it scans bodily processes unlike say, x-rays which look at the body itself, passing through skin but not through bone. CAT scanning is quite well known and basically interprets all the x-rays and combining them into a coherent image. There are other methods as well for investigating the body, such as ultrasound imaging and Magnetic Resonance imaging. So the PET technique is different and full of promise. Put simply, PET patients are given radio active tracers, which when they decay, they emit positrons which annihilate with the electrons in the body , producing the gamma

rays mentioned above, whose movement permits the PET scanner to diagnose where the centre of the ailment is.

Cancer treatment can be revolutionised as the latest interest is in using particles (instead of xrays, for example) . Beams of protons, neutrons and ions (electrically charged atoms) , hold advantages over x-ray radiotherapy. Particle therapy works by attacking the DNA of cancerous cells by ionization . This means that tumours can be targeted more accurately. The trouble is that x-rays are comparatively cheap, particle beams are not.

However, many patients have been successfully treated by the new system , but the technique still has some way to go before it becomes routine. Charged particles , ions and protons , are not the only way to attack tumours. Neutral particles can be even more effective, having a higher energy transfer than charged particles. Indeed, some companies are turning to antimatter as a potential form of particle therapy. They employ antiproton beams to investigate the effects of antiprotons in biological material/tissue

Another very important question arises from all this. If particles of antimatter and normal matter annihilate on contact,, can there be any antimatter left in the universe? Certainly

there are very violent reactions taking place in the universe. Does this denote the presence of antimatter? So far, we have to manufacture it. A very very long and elusive process. But this does not mean we cannot anticipate! We have mentioned Einstein in relation to Dirac`s work. Einstein`s famous equation : E=mc2, is the key to understanding: when antimatter annihilates, all is converted to energy, which greatly exceeds the energy output of burning oxygen and hydrogen in Shuttle rockets.

However, when we look around or indeed conduct experiments, we are aware that ordinary matter dominates the universe or what we know of it. We have mentioned earlier that there must have been an imbalance in the (incalculable) numbers of particles in the first fraction of a second of the universe`s life. One notable physicist puts it this way: it is possible that the theory of how the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the universe built up may need modification. But either way, we win because there is something that we don`t fully understand about the universe and therefore , there is something new to be found." . What we do believe (not know) is that

essentially all the objects we see in the universe are made of matter not antimatter. Antiparticles are created in the universe where there are high-energy particle collisions , such as in the centre of our galaxy. but none has been detected as left over from the Big Bang.

In science fiction, in such as Star Trek, antimatter is seen as the ultimate fuel , with its convertibility to energy. It may be that antihydrogen atoms will produce not only a means of space travel, but will reveal a different mathematical universe - in which positive is negative and left is right. A parallel universe? The Big Bang theory is of course the favourite explanation at present for the origin of the universe. Original particles began to enter space about 30 billion years ago, and began the three dimensional aspect that we know now. By about 12 billion years ago , these particles had begun to create the Primal aggregate of the Big Bang theory.

To give some idea of the costs involved, the present estimate is that it is possible to produce antimatter for about $25 billion per gram, roughly 1000 times more costly than present space shuttle propellants. The Wikipedia encyclopedia points out that thrust to weight equations in antimatter used in rocketry would enable an unmanned craft to reach Mars in about a month, instead of about a year in conventional terms. A concomitant could be that humanity would have the capability to make antimatter weapons!!

Section 3 Antimatter is created in the universe , as we have said: it is created in stars, like our sun, every day. In the sun , flares accelerate fast moving particles which collide with slower particles producing antimatter. Therefore it is possible to see antimatter as a natural but very mysterious thing. As Wikipedia comments , fictional portrayals of mirror-image objects have not been proven unsustainable. We cannot rule out the possibility that some antimatter star or galaxy exists somewhere. As we have stated above, collisions and annihilations are the essence of our topic. We hope that in future, space craft propulsion will be realisable. But before then we need to learn how to produce a sufficient amount of antimatter, how to store it, and how to utilise the energy in thrust to propel a starship. As a BBC article (h2g2) of 2001 says so concisely, annihilating a kilo of antimatter with a kilo of matter, would release the amount of energy contained in 28 million barrels of oil, but it would take a lot more than this to produce a kilo of antimatter. If direct antimatter drives are possible , we are light years away from building one. (!) But this fact does not stop the human race from trying to develop what we know and have. It is a fact for example that a particular government (USA) is trying at this very moment to develop future weapons based on antimatter. Super bombs for instance would render an enemy defenceless. If such bombs were eventually able to be produced , the version developed would not eject radioactive

debris. The main difficulty is, as we have noted, the storage of the antimatter particles after they have been produced! However, progress is being made but kept under wraps (by governments). Both military and air force arms of defence are investigating the potential of antimatter. We can end this section by quoting one of the scientists prominent in th e research. We need to get off this planet, because I`m afraid we`re going to destroy it. (Head of Washington State`s Centre for Materials Research). A telling comment, indeed.

At this juncture it is opportune to say a word or so about CERN, which has been mentioned earlier. CERN is mainly located in Switzerland, near Geneva, and its purpose, to reiterate, is to provide the particle accelerators needed for high energy research. As it happens, the WWW began as a CERN project, initiated by Tim Berners-Lee in 1980. The first web site went on line in 1991 and in 1993 the Web became universal. CERN produces antimatter, by means of high energy collisions to generate particles and their

Antiparticles. As the Exploratium article of a few years ago, said me morably, in their [CERN scientists] search for that elusive mechanism that would help explain the mystery of why we are here, physicists might discover something totally unexpected.

opening the door to an amazing new discovery no one has yet imagined. The CERN scientists are looking at how the universe would look if it was made out of antimatter. Would there be the slightest difference? - a comment and question made by a CERN spokesman. The fundamental fact to remember is that we need to manufacture antiatoms as the next step to understanding the basic properties of an antimatter world. A spokesman for the FERMI NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY , near Chicargo (does the same sort of work as CERN) says that to understand whether this mirror world is out there , you have to test its ingredients and see if they behave the way we would expect them to behave. [Exactly!]. . . Theoretically, a reaction could be contained if the collision could be slowed down. Then it may be that it could be used to power vehicles. And the nearest stars could be in reach that are trillions of miles away. As we know, antimatter developments are not only in pursuit of space travel, but for potential use for military robotic aircraft and even for sensors to detect terrorist weapons. Robotic aircraft powered by antimatter could reveal the whereabouts of enemy forces, by means of remote tv . As an American newspaper report graphically put it, reiterating the power of antimatter, a

millionth of a gram of antimatter contains enough energy to propel an aircraft three times around the world without refuelling. But as stated the main difficulty is storage of antimatter particles. Not all however is pessimistic: positrons and antiprotons can be stored in a device known as a Penning Trap which uses a combination of magnetic and electric fields to hold charged particles in a vacuum. This is however in the early stages. Several establishments are engaged in relevant researches; one of these is NASA, one of whose studies is focussing on whether the antimatter that occurs naturally in the Van Allen belts of earth and in the gas giant planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn, might be able to be collected with magnetic scoops at lower cost per gram by present means.

Comets do contain antimatter. Their bright areas produce light because of matter and antimatter annihilations. Their nucleus is composed of stony and iron antimatter. Its mass is of the order of probably billions of tons of antimatter. The bright head of the comet we can see in the sky is called the coma which is really a plasma composed mainly of interstellar dust and antimatter ions. The Oort Cloud , source of the comets, would be reachable by means of an antimatter drive a journey of some 50 years; nothing compare with today`s thousands . Of course, the ultimate goal of man is FLT (faster than light) propulsion. Whether it will ever be attainable is a matter for speculation at the moment! If attainable it will be by means of antimatter. Antimatter rockets work much like regular fusion drives but with differences. Instead of having a fusion reaction in a magnetically sealed combustion chamber , the antimatter drive mixes antihydrogen with hydrogen for a power output much higher than fusion.

The storage problem is maybe the greatest difficulty facing antimatter scientists. Unfortunately outer space seems to be best (though obviously difficult!) and also for extensive production. On

Earth, gravity will pull antimatter into disastrous contact with matter. On Earth, gravity has the opposite effect on antimatter i.e. antimattter is repelled by the gravitational force due to its opposite nature to that of matter. As we know, CERN is trying to find a solution to the gravity problem. We have mentioned the fundamental difficulty in understanding the matter- antimatter dichotomy : one theory put forward in an attempt to explain the seeming overwhelming presence of matter, is that the universe divided into two parts after its formation: our universe and an alternative universe of antimatter that cannot be seen by us. Research and advance into antimatter is not without its dangers of course. As an Encarta article states , discovering antimatter could mean the end of the Earth as we know it. One mistake could mean the release of high energy gamma rays that could wipe out the life on Earth in minutes. At present, we could (somewhat flippantly) summarise the (research) position by saying it is a race to see who can make the first antimatter element. At the moment, it (antimatter) is the most expensive substance on Earth; as the article says, about $62 trillion a gram! A CERN physicist states that our goal is to remove antimatter from the far-out realm of science fiction into the commercially exploitable realm for transportation and medical applications.

Another theory advanced is that in separate clusters of galaxies, antimatter and matter are located. It however must be admitted that our present understanding of the universe cannot explain the apparent striking imbalance between antimatter and matter if both had been created ab initio. The presence of large amounts of antimatter in the universe cannot be ruled out at present, nor can intense radiation which might be due to antimatter-matter collision. It may be that quasars are so visible and bright because of the existence in them of antimatter . They emit tremendous energy from a small volume of space, too great for physics to explain it.

Section 4

The first television fiction show appeared in 1966: Star Trek, featuring the Starship Enterprise. It soon became very popular, featuring the adventures of the crew of Starship Enterprise on its mission to explore outer space. In order to travel at speeds greater than light the Enterprise was equipped with Warp Drive , a hypothetical propulsion system that warps space so that distances between stars are greatly reduced. The Enterprise had faster than light engines powered by antimatter. With warp drives the space ships could reach far stars in hours or days , making possible stories that could fit human lifetimes. With warp drive the ships could reach distant stars in hours or days, fitting human adventures. Roddenberry, the science fiction writer, managed tp keep the stars realistically far but imagined human beings able to reach them . The mixing of matter and antimatter is the power source used by the spaceship whereby the antimatter (frozen anti hydrogen) is managed by magnetic fields , and never allowed to touch normal matter.Another possibility is the creation of rocket engines based on fusion reaction.

. Included in the science of startrek is the creation of a device which uses a beam radiated from one point to another where it stops at just the right place, and reconstructs the person it carries on the spot. Or it dematerialises the person and brings him or her to some other point. All is still in the correct positions and adhering together as if the transportee had not been dematerialized.

Some time ago an exhibition at the Science Museum in London, (among many other things) explained the differences between matter and antimatter and how their combination might one day power a spacecraft, like the Enterprise. At the moment, however, antimatter is impossible to store However, physicists are at present working on ways of storing antimatter particles , especially antiprotons for use as a power source for spaceships, by which antimatter is used as a heat source. May I be forgiven for quoting verbatim part of an article in Chemproject on the Web, which explains clearly the implications of the foregoing sentence. Matter/antimatter reactions

would heat a tungsten core which heats hydrogen as it flows through and then out of a rocket nozzle. This design is actually based on the solid core fission reactor, in which nuclear reactions are used to heat water and make something that is in effect an extremely efficient steam engine. This plan would provide an impulse of 800-1000 seconds more than twice that of the space shuttle. The article goes on to say that there are plans for a 400 ton spacecraft that could travel to Mars and back in four months, using only a few billionths of a gram of antimatter. This, it points out, is clearly much more efficient than current chemical propulsion , removing the need for large propellant tanks. Unfortunately, the price of antimatter as a propellant is prohibitive. At present, one milligram of antimatter costs nearly one hundred billion dollars to produce.

All in all, space exploration is a possibility in the future! Much more research has to be done of course and the physical laws might change again leaving mankind with a breakthrough or a dead end! It will however depend (as far as we can see) on the use of antimatter (as a propellant). Space travel is not at present a necessity but one day it will be. One forecast is that in the future, antimatter from comets will be used by the human race for deep space travel. Wind and solar dust are blasting antimatter off comets This can be (or will be ) collected in Penning Traps. At least , this is the plan. As the Antimatter Energy article (on the Web) says, using antimatter as a source of energy will enable millions of people in spacecraft to travel to space stations orbiting the Earth in minutes. A telling comment: A metric ton of antimatter could supply the world`s energy needs for a year. A real benefit apart from the obvious, is taking billions out of poverty. One day the space and resources on this planet will be exhausted. Will we have the ability to travel to distant planets to meet our future needs? It is a question that demands a positive answer.

By Robert Evans GENEVA | Wed Jul 25, 2012 6:05pm EDT (Reuters) - A seven metric ton particle detector parked for over a year on the International Space Station (ISS) aims to establish whether there is an unseen "dark universe" woven into the cosmos, the scientist leading the project said on Wednesday

And the detector, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer or AMS, has already broken all records in registering some 17 billion cosmic rays and storing data on them for analysis, Nobel physics laureate Samuel Ting told a news conference. "The question is: where is the universe made from anti-matter?" said Ting. "It could be out there somewhere far away producing particles that we could detect with the AMS." Physicists say that the event 13.7 billion years ago that brought the known universe into existence and has been dubbed the "Big Bang" must have created equal amounts of matter and anti-matter. But then anti-matter largely disappeared. Why that happened is one of the great mysteries of the cosmos which are being investigated through the AMS and scientific analysts back on the ground at CERN, the European particle physics research center where Ting spoke.

The purpose of the AMS program, he said, "is to search for phenomena that so far we have not had the imagination or the technology to discover". Some researchers have suggested that the invisible "dark matter" estimated to make up about 25 percent of the known universe could be linked to anti-matter, but others say that is highly unlikely. WAFTING VEIL These scientists argue that anti-matter could not survive in the close proximity to parts of the visible cosmos that latest observations suggest dark matter occupies - sometimes like a wafting veil between planets and stars. Matter and anti-matter are almost identical, with the same mass but opposite spin and energy charges. They can form separate parts of some elementary particles but if they are mixed together they are both destroyed instantaneously. Ting was speaking at a news conference with a team of U.S. astronauts who took the detector, which was developed and built at CERN, up to the ISS in May last year on the last mission of the U.S. space shuttle Endeavour. He said that so far the $2 billion detector, with its powerful magnets that bend particles with positive and negative charges in different directions, had functioned perfectly and not one of its multiple backup systems had been needed so far. Ting, a 75-year-old professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston, supervises the research on the material gathered from the AMS from CERN, guiding a team of some 500 scientists in many countries, including Russia and China.

He is however cautious about how long it will take for real discoveries to compare with the sighting announced this month of a totally new particle, believed to be the long-sought Higgs Boson, in CERN's Large Hadron Collider. The boson is part of a force called the Higgs Field that turned the minute pieces of flying debris after the Big Bang into solid matter, bringing them together to form galaxies, stars and planets, and later life. Asked when he expected to be able to report the first indications of dark matter or of an anti-matter mirror universe, Ting replied: "As late as possible," explaining that the analysis had to be done scrupulously and "step by step". It would be at least 50 years "before anyone would be foolish enough to launch an experiment like this again" now that the U.S. space program was shut down and current Chinese and Russian spacecraft could not take a load like the AMS, he said. Theoretical Physicists Probe the Majorana Mystery

ScienceDaily (Aug. 1, 2012) With headlines proclaiming the discovery of the Higgs boson -- the
so-called God particle -- particle physics has captured the imagination of the world, particularly among those who dwell on the nature of the cosmos. But this is only one puzzle seemingly solved in a universe of mysteries. In a recent paper in Physical Review Letters, Dartmouth physicists delve into another enigmatic particle.

Majorana is a name whose very mention evokes a veil of mystery. On one level, it refers to a mysterious particle that may exist on the boundary of matter and antimatter. Curiously, it is thought to be both a material particle and its own corresponding antiparticle. Matter and antimatter have long been a cause clbre in both scientific and science fiction circles. When matter and

antimatter collide, they typically disappear in a burst of energy -- not so with the Majoranas, thought to be stable and robust.

By virtue of these attributes, the mysterious Majoranas may be instrumental in solving other mysteries, perhaps even redefining the nature of the universe. Some astrophysicists suggest that Majorana particles comprise the elusive "dark matter" thought to form more than 70 percent of the known universe.

Despite intensive searches, no elementary particle has so far been found that is a Majorana particle. Over the last few years, however, condensed-matter physicists have realized that Majorana could collectively form as "quasiparticles," built out of ordinary electrons in matter, under appropriate physical conditions.

Thanks to their reputed robustness, these Majorana quasiparticles are believed to be suitable as the building blocks of quantum computers. Though theoretical at the moment, quantum computers have the potential to be orders of magnitude more powerful than our current digital devices. As envisioned, they would have immense capacities to store information and the ability to solve important computational problems with unprecedented efficiency.

The particle's namesake, the brilliant Italian physicist Ettore Majorana, is himself a mystery. In 1937, he postulated the theoretical existence of such a particle. Then, in 1938, he withdrew all his money from the bank in Naples, boarded the boat to Palermo, and was never seen again.

Theorist Lorenza Viola, a professor of physics at Dartmouth College, has joined the search for the Majorana -- the particle, not the man. Sharing the passion for the microscopic world with her longlost countryman, Viola and her colleagues act as theoretical detectives, peering into places where the elusive particle might be hiding.

Pursuit of the Majorana is made more complex since particles and quasiparticles are operating in the realm of quantum mechanics, at the subatomic level where the rules of classical physics don't apply. Quantum mechanics is the revolutionary body of principles that explains the behavior of matter and energy on the atomic and subatomic scale -- in essence a different reality from the everyday observable world.

"The challenge we have is that we work with the microscopic, not something like stars and galaxies that you can see and relate to," explains Viola. "I tell my students we are so big, this is so microscopic, and we just don't have enough imagination to visualize things at this level. But if we could be tiny as an electron, we could understand the quantum world much better."

These perceptual impediments notwithstanding, Viola is hot on the heels of the Majoranas. With Shusa Deng, a Dartmouth postdoctoral research associate, and colleague Gerardo Ortiz, a professor of physics at Indiana University, she has published a paper suggesting a locale where they may be found. They propose a theoretical model to support Majorana quasiparticles forming a class of exotic materials known as topological superconductors.

Viola describes the topological superconductors as having a "split personality." Their outside surfaces conduct electricity like a metal, but inside they are superconductors. The Dartmouth crew

hypothesizes that Majoranas should occur only on the surface or on the interior-exterior interface. Remarkably, unlike existing proposals, Viola and colleagues' proposal requires only conventional (so-called "s-wave") superconductivity in the bulk of the material, and no application of strong magnetic fields, preserving the important fundamental symmetry of "time reversal."

The hunt for Majoranas is currently under way in laboratories across the world. In a recent exciting experiment conducted by Dutch researchers, a semiconductor nanowire covered with a superconducting film was cooled in a strong magnetic field and found to possibly support Majoranas, as signaled by a peak in the conductance at zero energy. As additional experimental evidence is collected and scrutinized, Viola believes that s-wave topological superconductors will provide another rich arena in which to explore Majorana physics and further uncover new fundamental properties of topological quantum matter.

Does Antimatter Matter? By Sadie Jones

At the very beginning of the Universe, when it was extremely hot ~

K it is predicted that matter

and antimatter were created in equal amounts in the Big Bang, as the universe cooled the matter and antimatter would have been annihilated in pairs. Had the symmetry before the cooling been exact then the universe would not exist because all the matter and anti-matter particles would

have annihilated each other. Thankfully, a small asymmetry between matter and antimatter, called the CP violation resulted in the dominance of matter. In fact, if one was to work ou t what the universe was like one billionth of a second after it began, it turns out that for every billion particleantiparticle pairs there was just one extra particle. To that particle we and the stars owe our existence 8. It is very difficult for scientists to determine when the asymmetry in particles occurred, in the early stages of the universe, growing evidence suggests there was a period of extreme inflation to the order~ e60. This Inflation is likely to have taken place well below the scale of quantum gravity, so that any baryon number produced in the plank era (up to 10 -34 seconds after the big bang) was diluted to a negligible level19 i.e it would be very hard for particles to exist. Scientists are currently trying to unravel this mystery, asking firstly why one extra particle was created for every billion in the first place, and secondly, why was it a matter particle as opposed to an anti-matter particle.

Antimatter itself was predicted in 1928 by Paul Dirac, 4 years before it was detected by Carl Anderson21. Anderson was looking at cosmic ray tracks and noticed that some supposed electron tracks bent the wrong way in the magnetic field, this suggested these particle had an opposite charge; he had discovered the positron (anti-electron). Antimatter is the same as matter in every way but with opposite charge, the concept of antimatter was derived from the Dirac Equation. The equation combines quantum theory and special relativity to describe the behaviour of the fermions, spin particles, Equation 1.1.

Anti-particles do exist naturally on Earth, for example, when a high energy electron in a solar flare collides with carbon it can form a type of nitrogen that has too many protons relative to its number of neutrons, this makes its nucleus unstable, and a positron is emitted to stabilize the situation 3.

Anti-particles do not exist for very long on Earth however, because there is so much matter for the antimatter particles to collide with, such a collision will destroy both particles, transforming the entire mass of both particles into energy. The excess of matter we notice around us everyday was caused by the asymmetry at the beginning of the universe.

Symmetries and asymmetries are very important in particle physics; the CPT Theory describes the importance of particular symmetries. CPT Theory suggests that if one was able to take a particle, replace it with its antiparticle, look in the mirror and then reverse its direction in time, the result would be a particle indistinguishable from the original1. CPT stands for Charge, Parity and Time which are the 3 symmetries of particle interactions. Charge conjugation represents the replacement of matter with the antimatter counterpart, Parity corresponds to reversing all 3 coordinates i.e. ones image in a mirror appears back-to-front, right-to-left and upside-down and T is time reversal.

Since 1957 scientists have been aware that weak interactions violate both C and P symmetries. CP is defined as the product of charge and parity, if CP is conserved then every reaction that produces a particle will be accompanied by a reaction which produces its antiparticle at the exact same rate, so no baryon number can be generated 19. It was thought that C and P were always violated together so as to respect the CP combination, but this was not the case. James Cronin and Val Fitch at the US Brookehaven Laboratory discovered that CP was not conserved in the decay of neutral kaons (K Mesons); they named the effect CP Violation. Figure 2 shows a graphic of the of the beam experiment Cronin and Fitch used. They measured the decay of pions from the 2 types of neutral kaon species at the end of 57ft beam. The two kaon species have different lifetimes; this means one expects to see only the long lived pions at the end of the beam line.

However, 1 in 500 events at the end of the tube were detected as the short lived pions. For any expected particle velocity all short lived pions should have decayed long before the end of the tube. The reason for short lived pions being detected is as a result of the asymmetry in the kaon decay which leads to the CP violation theory7.

Some scientists believe that CP Violation is only partially to blame for the mass dominance of the universe, since the current particle experiments fail to account for the entire matter-antimatter imbalance14. One theory is that during the big bang the antimatter formed small windows that link our 3D physical universe with the 5D Hyperspace. Hyperspace theories however are as a result of complex mathematics and are not proven, hyperspace theorists generally believe that higher dimensions make the laws of nature easier. The 5D hyperspace theory basically says that the antimatter has not disappeared as such, but there is a whole universe composed of antimatter that overlaps our universe of matter, and is exactly the same in every way, apart from the type of matter it is made from15. Hyperspace theories open the door to parallel universes, and seem more like the Star Trek science fiction than science fact, they therefore are not considered as the scientific answer to the matter dominance of our universe.

Antimatter in hyperspace is not the only region of particle physics where science fiction may become fact. Scientists are currently researching ways that antimatter can be used in the engines of interstellar space craft. The propulsion of such space craft is based on the fact that the annihilation of antimatter-matter pairs results in an energy release equivalent to the mass of both particles. It is believed that this energy is more than can be generated by other propulsion methods16 since they yield the highest specific impulse and jet power. Howe and Hynes suspect that propulsion involving the antiproton mass-conversion reaction offers the highest potential but

the greatest problems17. However, If the problems with antimatter propulsion can be removed, it is proposed that such an engine could be used to launch manned missions to Mars and Jupiter in as little as 3.8 to 10.8 days respectively22, which is an incredibly exciting prospect.

To conclude, antimatter does matter and there are many exciting mysteries surrounding it, particularly why it exists in the first place, hopefully further particle accelerator experiments will aid in untangling its mystery. A complete understanding of CP violation and antimatter may ultimately aid in the completion of the Standard Model of Particle Physics and also show us how beings of matter, like ourselves, came to exist; the imperfection or CP Violation that caused the matter excess is definitive proof that perfection is not always paramount.