Originally posted by Astrophysics
Before the summerholidays I asked my physics teacher what anti-matter is and like always she didn't know . So now I'm asking you guys if you know exactly what anti-matter is and how we can make it useful.
I thank you in advance,
Astrophysics
Thed already gave a good link & description as to the properties of antimatter. I will add the analogy that is used most freauently to explain its existence.
Similar to general relativity, in which we are asked to imagine space-time as a flat rubber sheet, this analogy requires us to think of space-time as a flat sheet of cookie dough. In order to make a cookie, one must cut out a hole in the dough. If we take the cookie to represent a particle of matter, then antimatter is the hole that is left when we cut the cookie out of the dough. Just as one cannot make a cookie without cutting a hole in the dough, one cannot make a particle without making its corresponding antiparticle.
This fact can be somewhat troubling to particle physicists, because of what it implies about the early moments of the formation of the universe, when all existing matter first came into being. For each particle of matter that formed, an antiparticle must also have formed. By this reasoning, there should be equal amounts of matter and antimatter in the universe. So the troubling question is, "where it is all the antimatter?".
Some models have been formulated proposing that equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created, but their unequal rates of decay resulted in the eventual disappearance of most of the antimatter. Another model implies that for some unknown reason, there was a slight inequality in the amounts right from the beginning. Some variations of this model placed the discrepancy as little as one billion
and 1 particles of matter for everyone billion particles of antimatter. And the entire universe we see around us is that one-part-per-billion discrepancy.
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