IT WAS not so long ago that we were hearing how CERN’s Large Hadron Collider would produce planet-destroying black holes. Now Dan Brown’s blockbuster, due to , provides us with another supposed danger emanating from the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland: antimatter, the seed of a weapon of unsurpassed destructive power.
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While Brown’s take on antimatter is fictional, the stuff certainly isn’t. We see its signature in cosmic rays, and it is routinely made in high-energy collisions inside particle smashers the world over. In hospitals, radioactive molecules that emit antimatter particles are used for imaging in the technique known as positron emission tomography.
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Brown was right about one thing, though: if you want answers to the burning questions of antimatter, CERN is the place to go.
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Antimatter: A Briefing
- Every particle has an antiparticle with the same mass but the opposite electric charge. The proton has the negatively charged antiproton; the electron has the positively charged anti-electron, or positron.
- Neutral particles can have antiparticles, too. The neutron might have no charge, but quarks – the smaller particles that make it up – do. Turn these quarks into antiquarks by flipping their charges, and you’ve made an antineutron.
- The possibility of antimatter first surfaced in equations formulated by British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac in 1928 – four years before American experimenter Carl Anderson found positrons in cosmic rays.
- Notoriously, matter and antimatter destroy each other, or annihilate, whenever they come into contact. An electron and a positron mutually destruct in a puff of light consisting of two photons sent out in precisely opposite directions, each with an energy corresponding exactly to the mass of the electron (and positron).
- Antimatter by Frank Close (Oxford University Press, 2009)
