Antimatter in relativistic jets

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metastable
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Can black holes separate matter and antimatter via relativistic jets?
I have read that relativistic jets emitted by black holes are thought to contain a mixture of matter and antimatter including positrons and electrons. Is there any mechanism known that would lead to matter or electron concentration in one of the two relativistic jets, and antimatter or positron concentration in the other?
 

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  • #2
mathman
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Positron-electron pairs typically result for high energy gamma rays. In the lab they can be separated, but in the jets you describe there is no way.
 
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  • #3
metastable
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Is there any mechanism known that would lead to matter or electron concentration in one of the two relativistic jets, and antimatter or positron concentration in the other?

In the lab they can be separated, but in the jets you describe there is no way.

The reason I ask is in pair production I believe we get 2 particles of opposite spin and in the Stern Gerlach experiment we get "discrete points of accumulation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_production"However, all other conserved quantum numbers (angular momentum, electric charge, lepton number) of the produced particles must sum to zero – thus the created particles shall have opposite values of each other."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern–Gerlach_experiment"The Stern–Gerlach experiment demonstrated that the spatial orientation of angular momentum is quantized. Thus an atomic-scale system was shown to have intrinsically quantum properties. In the original experiment, silver atoms were sent through a spatially varying magnetic field, which deflected them before they struck a detector screen, such as a glass slide. Particles with non-zero magnetic moment are deflected, due to the magnetic field gradient, from a straight path. The screen reveals discrete points of accumulation, rather than a continuous distribution,[1] owing to their quantized spin."

https://journals.aps.org/pr/abstract/10.1103/PhysRev.126.310"The asymmetry ratio, defined as the ratio of the number of pairs emitted parallel to the photon polarization plane to the number of pairs emitted perpendicular to this plane, is plotted as a function of Δφ for the cases of no screening and complete screening. It is shown that for very small Δφ the cross section is a very rapidly varying function of Δφ, such that the pairs emitted within the angular region 2Δφ are predominantly perpendicular to the polarization plane for Δφ<Δφ0 [Δφ0=1.23(Z13111) for complete screening, for example] and predominantly parallel to this plane for Δφ>Δφ0."
 
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Vanadium 50
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Metsatable, if you aren't going to accept the answer, why did you ask the question?
 
  • #5
metastable
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Metsatable, if you aren't going to accept the answer, why did you ask the question?

I wasn’t sure if the meaning of “no way” in his answer was:

a) it is known that relativistic jets are unable to concentrate matter or antimatter in different regions

or

b) it could be possible, but since no proof of such a mechanism has previously been published, there is no “known” way
 
  • #6
metastable
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Can we say a) or b) above is a closer description of present understanding?

http://www.esa.int/spaceinimages/Images/2015/11/A_supermassive_black_hole_in_action
"The yellow-hued object at the centre of the frame is an elliptical galaxy known as Hercules A, seen by the Earth-orbiting NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. In normal light, an observer would only see http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2012/47/image/c/ floating in the inky blackness of space.

However, view Hercules A with a radio telescope, and the entire region is completely transformed. Stunning red–pink jets of material can be seen billowing outwards from the galaxy – jets that are completely invisible in visible light. They are shown here as seen by the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array radio observatory in New Mexico, USA. These radio observations were combined with the Hubble visible-light data obtained with the Wide Field Camera 3 to create this striking composite.

The two jets are composed of hot, high-energy plasma that has been flung from the centre of Hercules A, a process that is driven by a supermassive black hole lurking at the galaxy’s heart. This black hole is some 2.5 billion times the mass of the Sun, and around a thousand times more massive than the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy."

upermassive_black_hole_in_action_node_full_image_2.jpg
 

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