Why Do Matter-Antimatter Pairs Annihilate Instead of Sticking Together?

  • Thread starter Thread starter quantumkiko
  • Start date Start date
quantumkiko
Messages
28
Reaction score
0
Why does an matter-antimatter pair annihilate each other instead of "sticking" together (i.e. like ordinary matter with opposite charges do)?
 
Physics news on Phys.org
In fact, they don't always annihilate right away. For example, an electron and a positron may form a bound state called positronium. Positronium doesn't live forever, but a certain form of it can live for a relatively long amount of time, more than 100 nanoseconds! That may not sound like much, but it does show that matter and anti matter don't have to immediately annihilate.

http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v90/i20/e203402
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/17559
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positronium

Hope this helps.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
A relativistic positron can annihilate in flight with an atomic electron in matter. The integrated probability for a 50-MeV stopping positron is ~ 15%. See pages 384-6 in Heitler "The Quantum Theory of Radiation" Fourth Edition.
Bob S
 
Thank you very much for the feedbacks! I appreciate it. =)
 
Toponium is a hadron which is the bound state of a valance top quark and a valance antitop quark. Oversimplified presentations often state that top quarks don't form hadrons, because they decay to bottom quarks extremely rapidly after they are created, leaving no time to form a hadron. And, the vast majority of the time, this is true. But, the lifetime of a top quark is only an average lifetime. Sometimes it decays faster and sometimes it decays slower. In the highly improbable case that...
I'm following this paper by Kitaev on SL(2,R) representations and I'm having a problem in the normalization of the continuous eigenfunctions (eqs. (67)-(70)), which satisfy \langle f_s | f_{s'} \rangle = \int_{0}^{1} \frac{2}{(1-u)^2} f_s(u)^* f_{s'}(u) \, du. \tag{67} The singular contribution of the integral arises at the endpoint u=1 of the integral, and in the limit u \to 1, the function f_s(u) takes on the form f_s(u) \approx a_s (1-u)^{1/2 + i s} + a_s^* (1-u)^{1/2 - i s}. \tag{70}...
Back
Top