Antimatter consists of particles identical in mass but opposite in charge and quantum properties to regular matter; when antimatter meets matter, they annihilate, releasing energy.
Physicist Paul Dirac first predicted antimatter’s existence in 1928 through his equation describing electrons.
Antimatter is created in laboratories by smashing particles together at high energies in accelerators, and naturally it forms in cosmic ray collisions and certain radioactive decays in space.
When antimatter and matter collide, they annihilate each other, converting their mass into a burst of energy, usually gamma rays.
Yes, antimatter can be used as a highly efficient energy source because when it annihilates with matter, their mass converts completely into energy, releasing far more power than chemical or nuclear reactions.
There’s more matter than antimatter in the observable universe because, shortly after the Big Bang, a tiny imbalance caused matter to survive slightly more than antimatter, but the exact reason for this asymmetry is still unknown.
Positrons are the antimatter counterparts of electrons with a positive charge, found naturally in radioactive decay, cosmic rays, and produced artificially in medical PET scans.
In PET scans, antimatter is used by injecting a tracer that emits positrons; when these positrons meet electrons in the body, they annihilate and produce gamma rays that create detailed images of tissues and organs.
Antimatter is central to Big Bang theories because the early universe created nearly equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but a slight imbalance caused matter to dominate, leading to the formation of the universe as we know it.
Scientists store antimatter safely by trapping it in ultra-high vacuum chambers using powerful magnetic and electric fields (like in Penning traps) to keep it suspended and prevent it from touching matter, which would cause annihilation.