How is antimatter produced?
On the Earth, it is produced in tiny quantities in particle accelerators – high speed collisions by subatomic particles can result in the creation of both particles and antiparticles. Even so, that isn’t antimatter – antimatter would be matter composed of antiparticles. Very tiny quantities of antihydrogen have been produced at CERN but that is about all. It never lasts very long as the slightest touch of antimatter to matter results in the annihilation of both and the release of energy. What is observed sometimes in particle accelerators is that a photon decays into a particle and its antiparticle – the creation of matter apparently out of nothing. This is an interesting problem in relation to the Big Bang – it should have created equal quantities of matter and antimatter, which then annihilated themselves, leaving nothing left but a lot of radiation. So why are we here? There must have been an imbalance. The discovery of CP violation in 1964 shows that there are ways in which there c
