How is Antimatter Made?
In October 1955, the front page of the New York Times read: “New Atom Particle Found; Termed a Negative Proton”. Although antielectrons, known as positrons), were discovered more than two decades earlier, in 1932, the discovery of the antiproton proved that the whole idea of antimatter was not a fluke, and that all types of matter really did have evil twins. Antimatter is a form of matter identical to conventional matter except it has an opposite charge, and annihilates on contact with ordinary matter, releasing an amount of energy as determined by Einstein’s famous equation, E=MC2. The entire era of high-energy particle accelerators was kick started in an effort to discover the antiproton. Ever since the discovery of the positron, physicists suspected the antiproton existed. They constructed cyclotrons which probed progressively higher energies to see if the antiprotons could be found. In 1954, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Earnest Lawrence built the Bevatron at Berkeley, Californ
The same way regular matter is made. For example, any time a photon with atleast 1.1MeV decays you get a positron and electron. The positron is simply the antimatter equivelant of the electron, or the anti-electron. It was only by arbitrary choice that we use the word electron to describe the negatively charged particle. It could just as easily have been the positron, and then the electron would be referred to as anti-positrons.
And what’s it good for? HowStuffWorks.com gives you the skinny on matter’s counterpart. • Opinion: Plot Device of Mass Destruction Antimatter. The word might sound scary, but is there really anything to fear? A Brookhaven National Laboratory physicist gives his take. • Interview: Antimatter Spaceships Spacecraft powered by antimatter aren’t just within the realm of Star Trek science fiction — they’re theoretically possible. We chat with an expert. • Blog: CERN Ready for its Close-Up Jennifer Ouellette of Twisted Physics takes us behind the scenes at CERN, the particle physics lab where the antimatter bomb in Angels & Demons is created. • Video: Antimatter Rocket Ship Could antimatter power the next generation of spaceships bound for Mars and other planets? Watch this video to find out. • HowStuffWorks: Antimatter How do we know about antimatter, and where does it come from? Get educated at HowStuffWorks.com. Got something to say? E-mail your questions, comments or concerns to discover
