Antimatter

By Robert Roy Britt

Senior Science Writer
posted: 07:00 am ET
29 September 2003

Antimatter sounds like the stuff of science fiction, and it is. But it's also very real. Antimatter
is created and annihilated in stars every day. Here on Earth it's harnessed for medical brain
scans.
"Antimatter is around us each day, although there isn't very much of it," says Gerald Share of
the Naval Research Laboratory. "It is not something that can be found by itself in a jar on a
table."
So Share went looking for evidence of some in the Sun, a veritable antimatter factory, leading
to new results that provide limited fresh insight into these still-mysterious particles.
Simply put, antimatter is a fundamental particle of regular matter with its electrical charge
reversed. The common proton has an antimatter counterpart called the antiproton. It has the
same mass but an opposite charge. The electron's counterpart is called a positron.
Antimatter particles are created in ultra high-speed collisions.
One example is when a high-energy proton in a solar flare collides with carbon, Share
explained in an e-mail interview. "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.
But positrons don't last long. When they hit an electron, they annihilate and produce energy.
"So the cycle is complete, and for this reason there is so little antimatter around at a given
time," Share said.
The antimatter wars
To better understand the elusive nature of antimatter, we must back up to the beginning of
time.
In the first seconds after the Big Bang, there was no matter, scientists suspect. Just energy. As
the universe expanded and cooled, particles of regular matter and antimatter were formed in
almost equal amounts.
But, theory holds, a slightly higher percentage of regular matter developed -- perhaps just one
part in a million -- for unknown reasons. That was all the edge needed for regular matter to
win the longest running war in the cosmos.
"When the matter and antimatter came into contact they annihilated, and only the residual
amount of matter was left to form our current universe," Share says.
Antimatter was first theorized based on work done in 1928 by the physicist Paul Dirac. The
positron was discovered in 1932. Science fiction writers latched onto the concept and wrote
of antiworlds and antiuniverses.
Potential power
Antimatter has tremendous energy potential, if it could ever be harnessed. A solar flare in July
2002 created about a pound of antimatter, or half a kilo, according to new NASA-led
research. That's enough to power the United States for two days.
Laboratory particle accelerators can produce high-energy antimatter particles, too, but only in
tiny quantities. Something on the order of a billionth of a gram or less is produced every year.
Nonetheless, sci-fi writers long ago devised schemes using antimatter to power space
travelers beyond light-speed. Antimatter didn’t get a bad name, but it sunk into the collective
consciousness as a purely fictional concept. Given some remarkable physics breakthrough,
antimatter could in theory power a spacecraft. But NASA researchers say it's nothing that will
happen in the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile, antimatter has proved vitally useful for medical purposes. The fleeting particles
of antimatter are also created by the decay of radioactive material, which can be injected into
a patient in order to perform Positron Emission Tomography, or PET scan of the brain. Here's
what happens:
A positron that's produced by decay almost immediately finds an electron and annihilates into
two gamma rays, Share explains. These gamma rays move in opposite directions, and by
recording several of their origin points an image is produced.
Looking at the Sun
In the Sun, flares of matter accelerate already fast-moving particles, which collide with
slower particles in the Sun's atmosphere, producing antimatter. Scientists had expected these
collisions to happen in relatively dense regions of the solar atmosphere. If that were the case,
the density would cause the antimatter to annihilate almost immediately.
Share's team examined gamma rays emitted by antimatter annihilation, as observed by
NASA's RHESSI spacecraft in work led by Robert Lin of the University of California,
Berkeley.
The research suggests the antimatter perhaps shuffles around, being created in one spot and
destroyed in another, contrary to what scientists expect for the ephemeral particles. But the
results are unclear. They could also mean antimatter is created in regions where extremely
high temperatures make the particle density 1,000 times lower than what scientists expected
was conducive to the process.
Details of the work will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on Oct. 1.
Unknowns remain
Though scientists like to see antimatter as a natural thing, much about it remains highly
mysterious. Even some of the fictional portrayals of mirror-image objects have not been
proven totally out of this world.
"We cannot rule out the possibility that some antimatter star or galaxy exists somewhere,"
Share says. "Generally it would look the same as a matter star or galaxy to most of our
instruments."
Theory argues that antimatter would behave identical to regular matter gravitationally.
"However, there must be some boundary where antimatter atoms from the antimatter galaxies
or stars will come into contact with normal atoms," Share notes. "When that happens a large
amount of energy in the form of gamma rays would be produced. To date we have not
detected these gamma rays even though there have been very sensitive instruments in space
to observe them."
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In particle physics, every particle has a corresponding antiparticle. A particle and its
antiparticle have identical mass and spin.
A particle and its antiparticle have opposite values for all other non-zero quantum number
labels. These labels are electric charge, color charge, flavor, electron number, muon number,
tau number, and baryon number.
Every fermion (lepton and quarks) carries some charge-like quantum number labels, and each
has a distinct antiparticle partner with opposite values for those labels. For example, the
antiparticle of an electron is a positron -- it has exactly the same mass as an electron but
positive electric charge. (The positron is the only antiparticle with its own name. In all other
cases, the name of the antiparticle is anti- in front of the name of the particle, such as proton
and anti-proton.)
Charged bosons always have an antiparticle partner of opposite charge and equal mass. For
charge zero mesons with different types of quark and antiquark, there is an antiparticle
partner of that reverses the role of quark and antiquark. The Ko meson and its antiparticle
have the following composition.
 Anti-
Symbol Name Quarks
quarks

K-zero d quark s anti-quark

K-zero-bar s quark d anti-quark

For charge zero mesons with the same type of quark and antiquark, and for the charge zero
force carriers (photon and Z), the particle and the antiparticle are identical. The antiparticle of
a photon is a photon, likewise the antiparticle of a phi meson (s quark and anti-s quark) is a
phi meson.
Gluons are force carriers with zero electric charge, but each type of gluon has a color
charge. Thus each gluon has a corresponding antiparticle with a related color charge.
Matter and Antimatter
We call commonly observed particles such as protons, neutrons, and electrons "matter"
particles, and their antiparticles are then "antimatter ."
The term matter is then extended, by convention, to include:
 All quarks, (charges +2/3 and -1/3).
 All negatively charged leptons.
 Left handed neutrinos.
Antimatter is, then, any particle built from:
 Antiquarks (charges of -2/3 or +1/3).
 Positively charged leptons.
 Right-handed neutrinos.
A particle made from quarks, such as a baryon, is called matter. Similarly, a particle made
from antiquarks, such as the antibaryon, is called antimatter.
For bosons, there is no distinction between matter and antimatter. These classifications
simply do not apply. For example, a positively charged pion contains an up type quark and a
down type antiquark. The negatively charged pion contains a down type quark and up type
antiquark. Each of these particles is the antiparticle of the other, but neither can be called
either matter or antimatter. Similarly, force carrier particles cannot be classified as either
matter or antimatter.
In The Standard Model, properties of matter and antimatter are almost identical. One of the
big mysteries of cosmology (the theory of the evolution of the universe) is to explain why the
universe contains matter in preference to antimatter. A universe where matter and antimatter
occurred equally would not contain galaxies, but only black-body radiation - like the
microwave background seen in all directions.
Want to learn more about antimatter? Take a look at a Scientific American "Ask the Experts"
column written by R. Michael Barnett of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and
Helen Quinn (left) of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
Pair Production and Annihilation
Whenever sufficient energy is available to provide the mass-energy, a particle and its
matching antiparticle can be produced together. All the conservation laws apply in these
processes.
When a particle collides with a matching antiparticle, they may annihilate--which means they
both disappear. Their energy appears in the form of some fundamental boson--a gluon, a
photon or a Z particle. The bosons then decay to produce other particles and antiparticles.
During any process, the number of particles plus antiparticles of a related type are conserved
-- their total is the same before and after the process.
In weak interaction processes, a quark and antiquark of different flavors can annihilate into,
or be produced by decay of a W boson. The total charge of the pair must be +1 or -1. W
bosons can also decay to produce, or be produced from annihilation of, a charge -1 lepton
and a matching anti-neutrino, or an anti-lepton (charge +1) and its matching neutrino.
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In particle physics, antimatter is matter that is composed of the antiparticles of those that
constitute normal matter. If a particle and its antiparticle come into contact with each other,
the two annihilate; that is, they may both be converted into other particles with equal energy
in accordance with Einstein's equation E = mc2. This gives rise to high-energy photons
(gamma rays) or other particle–antiparticle pairs. The resulting particles are endowed with an
amount of kinetic energy equal to the difference between the rest mass of the products of the
annihilation and the rest mass of the original particle-antiparticle pair, which is often quite
large.
Antimatter is not found naturally on Earth, except very briefly and in vanishingly small
quantities (as the result of radioactive decay or cosmic rays). This is because antimatter which
came to exist on Earth outside the confines of a suitable physics laboratory would almost
instantly meet the ordinary matter that Earth is made of, and be annihilated. Antiparticles and
some stable antimatter (such as antihydrogen) can be made in miniscule amounts, but not in
enough quantity to do more than test a few of its theoretical properties.
There is considerable speculation both in science and science fiction as to why the observable
universe is apparently almost entirely matter, whether other places are almost entirely
antimatter instead, and what might be possible if antimatter could be harnessed, but at this
time the apparent asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the visible universe is one of the
great unsolved problems in physics. Possible processes by which it came about are explored
in more detail under baryogenesis
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