What actually is antimatter?

Antimatter was one of the most exciting physics discoveries of the 20th century. Picked up by fiction writers such as Dan Brown, many people think of it as an “out there” theoretical idea – unaware that it is actually being produced every day. What’s more, research on antimatter is actually helping us to understand how the universe works.

Antimatter is a material composed of so-called antiparticles. It is believed that every particle we know of has an antimatter companion that is virtually identical to itself, but with the opposite charge. For example, an electron has a negative charge.

Such particles were first predicted by British physicist Paul Dirac when he was trying to combine the two great ideas of early modern physics: relativity and quantum mechanics. Previously, scientists were stumped by the fact that it seemed to predict that particles could have energies lower than when they were at “rest” (pretty much doing nothing really). This seemed impossible at the time, as it meant that energies could be negative.

Dirac, however, accepted that the equations were telling him that particles are really filling a whole “sea” of these lower energies – a sea that had so far been invisible to physicists as they were only looking “above the surface”. He envisioned that all of the “normal” energy levels that exist are accounted for by “normal” particles. However, when a particle jumps up from a lower energy state, it appears as a normal particle but leaves a “hole”, which appears to us as a strange, mirror-image particle – antimatter.

Despite initial scepticism, examples of these particle-antiparticle pairs were soon found. For example, they are produced when cosmic rays hit the Earth’s atmosphere. There is even evidence that the energy in thunderstorms produces anti-electrons, called positrons.

Physics predicts that matter and antimatter must be created in almost equal quantities, and that this would have been the case during the Big Bang. What’s more, it is predicted that the laws of physics should be the same if a particle is interchanged with its antiparticle – a relationship known as CP symmetry. However, the universe we see doesn’t seem to obey these rules. It is almost entirely made of matter, so where did all the antimatter go? It is one of the biggest mysteries in physics to date.

The Conversation