- There's a warehouse in France, right on the Swiss border,
where the most expensive material in the world is created.
So Wikipedia seems confident,
but I'm not so sure we can even call it material
because it's not made of regular matter.
This stuff is the rarest and potentially
the most dangerous on Earth
and scientists from around the world
are just trying to figure out
how to put it in a bottle and carry it across the street.
Antimatter.
But what is antimatter and why is there so little of it?
It's the rarest substance on earth,
it's the rarest substance in the universe,
but scientists theorize that the big bang
should have created a universe
with equal amounts of matter and antimatter,
and yet we look around and see almost completely matter.
Why?
That is surprisingly one of the biggest unanswered questions
in physics and we're gonna dive into it.
Hey, I'm Diana, and you're watching Physics Girl.
I am back in the United States,
but I recently traveled to Switzerland,
initially to speak at EPFL in Lausanne,
but I decided to stop by the most impressive
scientific facility on Earth.
So we're in Geneva, Switzerland right now.
Oh no, I'm going--
We're in Geneva, Switzerland.
This is the home of the United Nations.
We're headed to the Large Hadron Collider
and I've never been and I'm really excited.
Ah!
(calming music)
Okay, so what is this room?
- This is sort of the storage locker area.
- I'm like, "Wow."
It's the storage locker. - Wow, the storage lockers.
So only people with access, special access can enter here.
So, this is what they called the ad hall
after the antiproton decelerator, the ad.
Yes.
And so this decelerator is beneath us,
beneath these concrete blocks.
You see these yellow fences?
So that's the big ring going around.
- So the whole purpose of the ad hall
is to house this ring inside of a concrete tunnel
that slows down anti-matter particles.
And then subsequently there are experiments that study it.
- We were doing the opposite of the rest of,
so we don't like protons, we want the antiproton.
We don't like accelerating, we want to decelerate.
- It's all shut down right now for maintenance.
So we got to go down in the tunnel.
Whoa.
Wow. Here's all this concrete and cement.
Oh my gosh.
I just went to Burning Man.
I feel like a lot of people were wearing this.
- So the blue things, they are bending magnets.
So they're typically at the corners of your ring
and they will turn your beam, you know,
give it a kick or a turn.
The red ones are the quadrupole magnets
and they are used to focus the beam.
- It's like Legos.
But instead, like each piece in the ring
is a giant electromagnet.
It's not a coincidence
that the antimatter factory is at CERN.
You need these super energetic particles
driven by the massive particle accelerators
at CERN to create antimatter.
- Well, the way they are generated
you have these collisions, big amount of energy.
And from this, you automatically have a side product,
being antiprotons that are created.
- They need to direct the antiprotons toward the ad hall
using these giant coils of wire.
- It's connected to some transformers
which will send this current to the magnet.
So you can have this tiny kick off your beam path.
- So all that specialized equipment
and the crazy amounts of energy you use
to create energetic particles is part of why
antimatter is so expensive.
In 2006 antimatter cost an estimated
$25 billion per gram to make.
Sounds like a lot, but that's just for positrons.
For antiprotons, some estimates
put the cost at about $3 quadrillion per gram.
To figure out why anti matter is so rare
we have to first look at why it can be so dangerous.
When anti-matter comes into contact
with regular matter, they annihilate.
They disappear and they turn into pure light energy.
If one teaspoon of anti-matter
came into contact with regular matter,
it would create an explosion,
large enough to destroy all of Manhattan.
For comparison, you'd need about 200,000 metric tons of TNT
to release the same amount of energy
or 10 nuclear bombs.
To make it even more relatable,
the amount of antimatter you would need
to destroy the moon would be equivalent
to the same mass of all the fish on earth.
(laughs)
But let's be clear.
The small amount of anti-matter
that we're capable of making with current technologies
is in no way dangerous.
So what is antimatter?
What is this stuff that's capable
of annihilating with regular matter?
This stuff would look just like regular matter
if we had enough of it, to be able to see it.
Amazingly, scientists predicted
that anti-matter should exist
before they discovered it,
which is gonna help us figure out what it is.
This is what happened.
You know, when you're solving the quadratic equation?
X equals negative B plus and minus square root
blah, blah, blah.
That plus or minus can give you two possible solutions.
But sometimes you get a negative solution
and you're like, "Ah, that doesn't make sense.
"I'm gonna throw it out."
Well, in 1928, English physicist, Paul Dirac
was working on a mathematical equation
describing electron behavior as you do.
And it ended up with two solutions.
Instead of throwing out the positive solution,
he eventually thought, what if this second solution
described something real?
It would be exactly like an electron,
all the same properties, but with a positive charge.
That would be crazy.
But he predicted this particle could exist
according to the math.
- Already in 1932 in one of their cloud chambers,
you know these tracks,
they saw an electron with, let's say the wrong charge.
- How insane is physics?
They discovered a new type of particle,
cause it just popped out of the math.
American physicist, Carl Anderson
detected this opposite electron
and then published a paper,
calling it a positron and the name stuck.
Which makes me wish that electrons were called negatrons.
That'd be cool.
Now we're in for a treat
because unlike many experiments of the time,
there's actually a photograph of the original positron
passing through a cloud chamber experiment in 1932.
This line shows the path of the particle.
This was the first discovery of antimatter.
- Each matter particle has a brother or a sister
and it has the same mass, but it has the opposite charge
and the opposite magnetic moment.
At least that's what our theories tell us.
- So that's what anti-matter is.
But it's kind of a boring description of anti-matter
because it ignores the annihilation and stuff.
Okay so, 1932, we've had the first detection of anti-matter,
the same year as the Quidditch match
between the Appleby Arrows and the Vratsa Vultures.
It wasn't until 1995, that physicists
made the first atom of antihydrogen.
Why did it take so long?
Well, annihilation.
It's really hard to work with material
that you can never hold in your hand.
It can't even touch your equipment or poof.
It can't even touch the air or poof.
So this factory in Europe,
its goal is to keep making and studying
a material worth nearly trillions per ounce.
What are they studying?
Well, there's one big question
keeping scientists interested.
Scientists don't know why antimatter is so rare.
That's one of the big unanswered questions
in physics of our time.
So the CERN experiments are looking to study
the properties of antimatter
and see if they can find any differences
between it, and regular matter.
A few experiments are studying
what will happen when you drop antimatter.
Will it go down like regular matter?
Nearly every physicist says, "Yes,
"we suspect it will go down when you drop it."
But we've never done that experiment.
Another experiment is just trying
to store anti-matter in a container
and carry it across the street.
- So this experiment is called Puma.
They want to bring this, you know,
their bottle of anti-matter
to a facility across the street.
And so there, they have different elements
that are radioactive.
And so if we have antimatter interacting with this,
you know, you will get an annihilations,
but the properties of what comes out of this annihilation
will tell you something about how the neutrons
and protons were distributed in these nuclei.
- And several other experimental groups
hope to study the spectral lines of antihydrogen
and compare them to hydrogen.
- So we know exactly what colors hydrogen emits,
but so we recently were able
to do the same type of spectroscopy,
looking at the light that comes out of antihydrogen.
- And some experiments like the one at Elise works on
are measuring the properties of antiprotons
that they've trapped to see
whether they're the same as proton properties.
- Base is purely antiprotons.
So they typically, or we typically
have a reservoir of antiprotons,
about, let's say 200 antiprotons that we can store
in this penning trap that you've seen.
And we can keep this.
The record was 400 years.
- 400 years. - 400 years. 400 days.
And so we take one anti-proton at a time,
put this in our measurement trap
and we try to measure its properties.
So charge, mass and magnetic moment.
- So that's the answer to our question.
Why is there so little anti-matter in the universe?
We don't know yet.
That's why all these really, really smart people
are doing crazy experiments,
trying to figure it out at CERN.
And I'm really excited to follow along
and see what they find.
Cause I know they'll find something.
Thank you guys so much for watching this video
and happy antiphysicsing.
- [Levi] You're the messiest boss I've ever had.
- I am not messy.
Nothing to see here.
Because we have an announcement,
which is that we're starting a Patreon.
These trucks.
If you were like, "Oh, what is going on?
"What's this Patreon thing?"
It's ostensibly a platform that allows independent creators
to be supported through their audience,
but it's also an excellent place for a community.
And that's what I want.
That's why my first perk I decided on
was an online hangout with Patreons.
And then there's signed postcards with experiments on them.
Oh, we've been saving up the bloopers.
Make a--
Coin.
Make a coin--
So what next, what are we gonna do
with the support from Patreon?
Well, I really wanna do bigger projects.
On location shoots like this one at CERN,
a women in science series done the right way,
where women just talk about their science
and upgrading equipment.
Plus, supporting this really significant
recent change to Physics Girl.
I have some paid full-time friends.
Levi, full-time shooter editor,
Heather, mostly full-time producer.
And so your patronage can help keep them off the streets.
And give me some real friends.
No, but really they (growling sounds).
- [Levi] Well said.
- If you want to contribute to the Patreon,
my favorite option is just Google Physics Girl Patreon.
Oh yeah.
You don't have to contribute.
If you don't want to or you can't.
That is totally fine.
I'm super thankful for just having you watching the videos
and getting excited with me about science
cause that's kind of the whole point.
Yeah.
Stop, don't show then, don't show them.
(gentle music)