Matter Vs. Antimatter-They have reversed charge, but sadly not reverse gravity.

[krash661]

"Antimatter gravity could explain Universe's expansion:"
http://phys.org/news/2011-04-antimatter-gr...-expansion.html

"Anti-matter atoms to address anti-gravity question:"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16756457

Image Source (before editing):
http://www.atlas.ch/angels-demons/3.html


Any thoughts on this subject ?

 

[mfb]

Your first and last link look broken.

Question: If antimatter was predicted via the negative time solutions of Einstein's equations, shouldn't it also have both reverse gravity and reversed charge?

I think you mean the Dirac equation. In General Relativity, gravity is linked to energy, and antiparticles have a positive energy - they should fall down.

The positronium experiment looks interesting, but I think it will take 1-2 years until we get results. The same is true for the antihydrogen experiments.

 

[krash661]

Ahh, I apologize for the link issues.

"Antimatter gravity could explain Universe's expansion:"
http://phys.org/news/2011-04-antimatter-gravity-universe-expansion.html

"Anti-matter atoms to address anti-gravity question:"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16756457

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?....313338668752549.73826.313312622088487&type=1

Yes this topic does or is talking about the Dirac equation,

" From Quarks to Quasars(facebook page)
Question: If antimatter was predicted via the negative time solutions of Einstein's equations, shouldn't it also have both reverse gravity and reversed charge?

Asked By: John Martin

They have reversed charge, but sadly not reverse gravity.

Let's get the record straight. Antimatter was not predicted by Einstein's equations, but by the famous Dirac equation. But a minor error, so let's move on. "

and thanks for your response,
I appreciate this.

 

[Crazymechanic]

@mfb you say antiparticles have positive energy but then does something have negative energy , because how come energy be negative? I just wanted to clear things up by asking this.

 

[mfb]

No particle has a negative energy.
You can get a negative energy density, this is related to the Casimir effect.

 

[andrien]

No particle has a negative energy.
You can get a negative energy density, this is related to the Casimir effect.

A description of negative energy electron in dirac sea is used.The positrons which are an absence of the negative energy states are considered real and having positive energy.
Casimir effect is related to vacuum point zero energy which is just first infinity of quantum electrodynamics but it is just subtracted away as it is supposed that only differences will matter.but this zero point electromagnetic field has other consequences as well.

 

[Bill_K]

A description of negative energy electron in dirac sea is used.The positrons which are an absence of the negative energy states are considered real and having positive energy.

Must we discuss the Dirac sea again? Dirac proposed his hole theory in 1933. It was refuted by Heisenberg in 1934, and Dirac himself quickly abandoned it. Nevertheless here we are 80 years later...

Despite its obvious shortcomings, hole theory seemed at least somewhat plausible in the framework of first quantization, when people still thought of the Dirac ψ as a wavefunction analogous to the Schrödinger ψ, all of whose solutions represented realizable states.

But in second quantization, ψ becomes an operator which creates particles and destroys antiparticles, and physical states form a Hilbert space in which negative energy states simply do not appear.

Next you will tell me that antiparticles move backwards in time.

 

[andrien]

Must we discuss the Dirac sea again? Dirac proposed his hole theory in 1933. It was refuted by Heisenberg in 1934, and Dirac himself quickly abandoned it. Nevertheless here we are 80 years later...

Despite its obvious shortcomings, hole theory seemed at least somewhat plausible in the framework of first quantization, when people still thought of the Dirac ψ as a wavefunction analogous to the Schrödinger ψ, all of whose solutions represented realizable states.

But in second quantization, ψ becomes an operator which creates particles and destroys antiparticles, and physical states form a Hilbert space in which negative energy states simply do not appear.

Next you will tell me that antiparticles move backwards in time.

no,I will not tell you anything this time.Somethings like topology of aharnov bohm effects are explained using the sea of fermions at someplaces which just makes thing easier,if not correct entirely.

 

[Bill_K]

andrien, Sorry, I'm not trying to be tough on you, but the misinterpretation of antiparticles has been a recurrent issue.

Somethings like topology of aharnov bohm effects are explained using the sea of fermions at someplaces which just makes thing easier,if not correct entirely.

You may be thinking of http://quantumtheory.physik.unibas.ch/bruder/woelfle60.pdf, in which a measurement of the Aharonov-Bohm effect relies on the electron tunneling between two electrodes. The Fermi sea encountered in condensed matter, where the particle states are filled up to some Fermi energy, is a different thing entirely. The hole states in such a case are quasiparticles, not antiparticles.

 

[andrien]

http://www.nat.vu.nl/~mulders/QFT-0.pdf
actually I was talking about the above page 41.Also you cut my statement in half at middle.The structure of vacuum with zero point energy can be explained using a sea of particles which will alter the structure of vacuum.One more thing can you cite me a reference where Dirac has abandoned this sea interpretation himself in single particle dirac theory.thanks.

 

[Bill_K]

I was talking about the above page 41.

Obviously some references will get it right and some will still get it wrong. Anyway, on p31 he says,

...Dirac supposed that the negative energy states were already completely filled and the exclusion principle prevents any more particles to enter the sea of negative energy states...We will see how this is properly implemented (also for bosons!) when quantizing fields.

Apparently he considers the Dirac Sea a proposal that was later done properly by second quantization. (The "implementation" on p61 turns out to be anticommutators.)

On the page you referenced, p41, he points out that the Aharonov-Bohm effect is a "manifestation of a nontrivial vacuum [for electromagnetism] ala the Dirac sea for fermions." We all agree that the vacuum state is "nontrivial", but I see no relationship between the two cases.

can you cite me a reference where Dirac has abandoned this sea interpretation himself in single particle dirac theory.

Contrast the treatments given in the early and later editions of "Principles of Quantum Mechanics".

 

[andrien]

I do not want to continue this discussion but a last question is what do you think about the reason for being a non-trivial vacuum.It is amusing to note that klein nishina formula was first derived using the interpretation that all negative energy states are completely unfilled but it still gives the correct answer.

 

[Bill_K]

It is amusing to note that klein nishina formula was first derived using the interpretation that all negative energy states are completely unfilled but it still gives the correct answer.

Well, that's an interesting point! According to the description in The Oskar Klein Memorial Lectures (vol 2 p 105) they did things quite differently:

A modern reader of the Klein-Nishina paper [1928] is struck by the fact that Dirac's field quantized theory is not applied, although it was readily available, There are thus in their paper no processes of photon absorption by the electron, no intermediate states, no re-emissions of a photon. They did not apply a quantized electromagnetic field, but rather a classical field... The negative energy states as solutions to the Dirac equations were considered physically without meaning. One sentence in the paper reads: "We will of course limit ourselves to positive values."

 

[krash661]

Interesting.

 

[lpetrich]

Antimatter has positive inertial mass and positive "energy mass", so by the Equivalence Principle, it must therefore have positive gravitational mass.

"Energy mass"? From a particle's pair-production threshold being twice its rest mass.

Inertial mass? Going from particle to antiparticle has the same charge-to-mass ratio but with opposite sign.

There's also the question of such matter/antimatter-dependent gravity would work out for different sorts of particle. A particle that is its own antiparticle would produce zero gravity, and interactions between persistent particles would also produce zero gravity. Thus, binding energy would produce zero gravity.

So there would be a composition difference in the gravitational force. From nuclear binding energy, it would be about 10^-3 between (say) water and iron (Nuclear binding energy). Small, but detectable. Differences in internal structure between protons and neutrons will also contribute.

[1207.2442] Torsion-balance tests of the weak equivalence principle reports on comparisons of beryllium, titanium, aluminum, and platinum.

Observed accelerations for Be-Al and Be-Ti are <~ 10^-15 m/s²

That's about 10^-13 for Earth and Sun effects, and 10^-5 for dark-matter effects. That's well under 10^-3, so one can rule out that theory.

 

[mfb]

From nuclear binding energy

QCD binding energy within the nucleons would be even worse - as 99% of the mass of a proton comes from that. If gravitational force from nucleons would come from valence quarks only, the proton would have a mass of just ~20 electrons, and a neutron would fall much quicker than a proton. I think that effect would be visible just by dropping lead and (frozen) hydrogen and watching.

 

[lpetrich]

That would be correct if the quarks were nonrelativistic, but the sizes of the nucleons are much less than the Compton wavelengths of the up and down quarks, making those quarks very relativistic. In fact, from nucleon sizes, one finds that each valence quark has a few hundred MeV of mass each, adding up to much of the mass of a nucleon.

 

[mfb]

The energy of valence quarks is significant, but that is true for the energy of virtual quarks as well. And if we consider energy (from relativistic quarks) as relevant for gravity, we have the regular GR (gravity acting on energy) anyway.
Anyway... if antimatter (including virtual antiquarks) would fall upwards in some way, this should have been noted in precision experiments with protons, neutrons and electrons.

 

[webb202]

Anti-matter and gravity

Is there any evidence about the response of anti-matter to gravitational fields?

 

[Chenkb]

Book of A. Zee "Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, Second Edition" page-36:

It is difficult to overstate the importance (not to speak of the beauty) of what we have
learned: The exchange of a spin 0 particle produces an attractive force, of a spin 1 particle
a repulsive force, and of a spin 2 particle an attractive force, realized in the hadronic strong
interaction, the electromagnetic interaction, and the gravitational interaction, respectively.

In my opinion, antimatter also exchange spin-2 graviton, thus they attractive, too.

 

[mfb]

Is there any evidence about the response of anti-matter to gravitational fields?

So far, there is no direct measurement of the response of antimatter to gravitational fields, but I think there is no reason to expect a deviation from GR here. It would be too weird, especially as most of the mass of protons and neutrons comes from hadronic binding energy - or virtual particles and antiparticles, if you like that view, but certainly not just the mass of the valence quarks.

 

[Bill_K]

Is there any evidence about the response of anti-matter to gravitational fields?

As was just pointed out in another thread, the labels particle and antiparticle cannot be applied universally.

The photon is its own antiparticle, and it definitely falls down. How would that fact fit into a theory in which antiparticles fall up?

Also the π⁺ and π^- are antiparticles of each other, but there's no way to decide which one is the "particle" and which is the "antiparticle."

 

[chamunda]

If we can make the antimatter particles spin will they levitate and therefore can be allowed to be contained in penning trap for a long time to be studied?

 

[Drakkith]

If we can make the antimatter particles spin will they levitate and therefore can be allowed to be contained in penning trap for a long time to be studied?

Why would they levitate?

 

[Bill_K]

If we can make the antimatter particles spin will they levitate and therefore can be allowed to be contained in penning trap for a long time to be studied?

Penning traps are a good way to confine charged particles, and often used as a part of antiparticle experiments. But their action relies on the particle's charge, not its spin.

 

[chamunda]

Penning traps are a good way to confine charged particles, and often used as a part of antiparticle experiments. But their action relies on the particle's charge, not its spin.

Thanks for your reply Bill.

What I want to do is to find out how to capture and hold antimatter particles for a long time (3-4) month period so that they can be studied by scientific community and in future can be used as an energy source for space travel.

Thanks

 

[mfb]

Penning traps are a good way to confine charged particles, but there are at least two problems:

• even in the best vacuum on earth, some particles are present, and eventually your antiprotons will annihilate with them
• you cannot store relevant quantities of antiprotons (e.g. worth GJ of energy for space travel), as the accumulated charge would lead to a strong repulsion between the trapped particles. You can make neutral hydrogen, but then catching and trapping them is really tricky.