![]() Such a power source would therefore be orders of magnitude more efficient than many other theoretical power sources, including controlled artificial nuclear fusion (though waste, in that case, would simply be various quantities of larger elements that you could also fuse together until you are left with iron as an ultimate byproduct). The appeal of such a technology is obvious since taking a large mass of ordinary hydrogen and an equal mass of antihydrogen and combining them would produce effectively pure energy with almost no waste other than neutrinos and smaller annihilating particle-antiparticle pairs, which in turn annihilate to produce additional energy. The energy released in this process of annihilation is pretty significant, relatively speaking, and is one of the reasons matter-antimatter collisions are often used in science fiction as powerful sources of energy for fueling advanced technologies. If you are dealing with heavier antiparticles like protons and antiprotons, the collision can produce a mix of high-energy photons, smaller particle-antiparticle pairs, and neutrino-antineutrino pairs, while smaller elementary particle-antiparticle pairs like electrons and positrons annihilate to high-energy photons. Whenever most particles and their antiparticles come into contact, they will immediately annihilate each other in a burst of high-energy photons (gamma rays), according to the combined mass of the two particles using Albert Einstein's mass-energy equivalence formula, E=mc 2. If you know anything about antimatter, it is probably that it really does not play nice with ordinary matter. What happens when matter and antimatter come into contact? To date, only a limited number of antihydrogen atoms have ever been created, and researchers have only gotten as far up the periodic table of anti-elements as an antihelium nucleus. The theory part is much easier, however, as antimatter proves incredibly difficult and costly to both produce and then contain in practice. This should extend all the way up through anti-iron, antigold, and even anti-uranium, all of which should be able to form anti compounds, like antiwater, antiquartz, and even anti-proteins. In both theory and practice, there's nothing stopping the entire periodic table from having an entire complementary table full of anti elements like antihydrogen, antihelium, and antioxygen. From there, positrons, antiprotons, and antineutrons can be captured by the same electromagnetism that pairs electrons, neutrons, and protons together to form atoms, creating an antiatom. ![]() Two up antiquarks and one down antiquark can combine to form an antiproton with a negative charge in the exact same way that two up quarks and one down quark form a regular proton. Since antimatter particles themselves are essentially identical to regular particles with the main difference being the reversal of their charge, antiparticles interact with each other in very familiar patterns. So rather than one up quark and two down quarks as in an ordinary neutron, antineutrons will instead be made out of an up antiquark and two down antiquarks, which is an important difference between these and something like a photon. In the case of neutral composite antiparticles like the antineutron, the net charge and mass will be the same as its ordinary matter counterpart, but these are still composite particles made up of antiquark complements to the ordinary neutron's quarks. There are also more elementary antiparticles like antineutrinos, while some particles are their own antiparticle (typically elementary bosons like photons or the hypothetical graviton), that do not interact with each other but simply pass through one another. These combine to form positrons, antiprotons, and antineutrons, which is mostly what we are concerned with when we commonly talk about antimatter. The various quarks make up the matter as we know it and thus have complementary antiquarks. Wherever ordinary matter will have positive baryon or lepton numbers, antimatter will have negative baryon and lepton numbers.Įvery particle of matter in physics is known or hypothesized to have an antiparticle equivalent, even photons. So, whereas an electron is a negatively charged particle with a quantifiable atomic mass, a positron is a positively charged particle with the same atomic mass as an electron.īoth matter and antimatter can be defined by their baryon or lepton numbers. In simple physical terms, antimatter is the mirror image of ordinary matter, but with the opposite electrical charge. That last bit is the real challenge, obviously, but it's helped drive new innovations with antimatter that could help power warping drives sooner than you'd think.
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