The whole world, nay the whole universe is made of matter.
Everything.
You, me, pizza, black holes, puppies, dark matter.
Everything.
But there’s also this lil’ thing called antimatter.
Around the turn of the last century, Einstein was working on the theory of relativity and
other physicists were trying to figure out how the tiniest parts of our universe worked
-- this is called quantum theory.
This was all done with math.
Lots of math.
At one point a physicist named Paul Dirac realized…
X-squared equals 4 has two answers.
Two.
AND Negative two.
This means, if matter is the two, there must be some kind of opposite to fit with the negative
two.
Physicists called this opposite antimatter.
The reason you don’t see antimatter around, is because if it were to pop into existence
and hit regular matter -- the twos would cancel each other out and disappear in a burst of
energy called an annihilation.
You probably know that all matter is made of protons and electrons…
their antimatter opposites are called antiprotons and positrons.
A proton is a positive heavy particle -- an antiproton is a negative heavy particle.
Electrons are light and negative, positrons are light and positive.
Again, because of their opposite-ness, if they touch, BOOM.
Gone.
But we’ll come back to that.
Even though they have these opposite charges… in theory, antimatter should be the same as
matter.
After The Big Bang, the universe should have created equal amounts of matter and antimatter.
But there’s not really any antimatter around.
Because, in the first second after the Big Bang, all the matter and antimatter in the
newborn universe found each other and BAM!
ANNIHILATIONS GALORE.
All the antimatter disappeared in bursts of energy, leaving behind just… matter.
No one knows why the Big Bang made more matter than antimatter.
But these scientists are making antimatter to find out more about it…
this facility creates antimatter using the particle beams at CERN we convert protons
into antiprotons CERN is the Center for European Nuclear Research,
we went there last year, and it’s where the Large Hadron Collider lives.
This Antimatter Factory takes protons shooting along the LHC and converts them to antihydrogen
-- the antimatter version of hydrogen.
Then Dr. Bertsche and his team trap the antihydrogen to study it.
We know a lot about hydrogen, so we wanna see how antihydrogen might be different.
But remember, you can’t let antimatter touch matter, ever.
No air, no fancy containers…
nothing that’s made of matter.
So, the scientists use magnetic fields to hold the antihydrogen inside this trap.
They behave like little tiny refrigerator magnets and consequently we basically have
to arrange a magnetic field geometry that looks kind of like a bathtub.
So, the antihydrogen atoms basically sit in a magnetic bathtub or magnetic bottle.
But it's really actually physically shaped like a bathtub.
it's about the size of sort of a two liter coke bottle.
The magnetic bathtub is called a Penning-Malmberg trap.
The magnetic field keeps the antihydrogen from hitting the walls of the trap and annihilating
-- because remember, no touch matter.
Powerful magnets and lasers force the antihydrogen to get stuck inside the magnetic field like
a piece of candy in a bowl.
Once they’ve trapped the antimatter, the scientists at the Factory can learn things
about this mysterious mirror of our universe’s matter.
For example, what color it is… it’s pink.
We have reason to believe that there's some difference that we don't understand yet between
matter and antimatter
If I had a glass bowl full of hydrogen gas, I could make like a neon lamp.
If you had a antihydrogen lamp it would be a sort of pinkish purplish color.
Disappointingly, antimatter isn’t some kind of miracle form of matter.
It doesn’t have antigravity, it doesn’t do…
well, anything different.
If you could build an antimatter table, it would just… be a table.
That is weird, right?
What if -- in those few hot moments after the Big Bang -- the universe was completely
made of antimatter?
Would it feel exactly the same?
I mean, think about it.
If antimatter and matter are exactly the same.
Then what is the difference?
If the whole universe was made of antimatter we’d just call that matter.
And what we think of as matter would be called antimatter.
All the things we call positive are just relative!
All the charges are relative to our experience with our universe which arbitrarily is made
of matter.
Physics get’s really weird when you get right down to it.
In the end, an antimatter universe -- based on everything we know, would look and feel
exactly the same as our own.
But more research is needed.
Scientists trapped antimatter for the first time in 2010.
Now, just a few short years later, they’ve learned to trap more than a dozen antiatoms
at a time over and over again!
WoooooooooooOOoOOoo Antimatter has been held by experiments here
for many many months and indeed one of the experiments has a collection of antiprotons
that they grabbed onto some time early last year and they've actually still have the same
antiprotons that they've had the whole time They want to hold onto it so they can keep
testing it.
But even still, after a bit they have to let the antimatter go.
Then it annihilates and disappears.
But even though annihilation sounds like a big, violent, terrible, thing…
it’s actually kind of like a …
The scientists see some gamma radiation, and that’s all she wrote.
Practically speaking, CERN has only made 10 nanograms of antimatter.
Ever.
All the energy from annihilating it, could only power one light bulb for, 4 hours.
And to make that antimatter takes a billion times more energy than what we get back from
annihilating it.
There’s not a lot of practical applications for this antimatter research yet… but…
Antimatter is actually commonly used in a lot of medical techniques such as a positron
emission tomography.
//
Also called a PET scan, it’s used for cancer diagnoses.
Look, Star Trek famously traveled the universe using engines that ran on matter-antimatter
reactions.
But, based on what we know of antihydrogen, whether we could do that is a big old shrug.
At the moment, almost a century after it was first theorized, antimatter research is still
in its infancy, but thanks to Dr. Bertsche and dozens of grad students and scientists
around the world, maybe someday we’ll know more.
The antimatter factory make their antiprotons using the Large Hadron Collider.
But do you even know what the Large Hadron Collider is?
We went there.
Check it out here, it's going to blow your mind.
How do you guys feel about physics with no practical application?
Boring or incredible?
Tell us in the comments, please subscribe for more Seeker and thank you so much for
watching.