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What is origin of antimatter?

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Anonymous

13y ago
Updated: 8/19/2019

The origin of antimatter on earth today is the Hadron-collider at CERN in Switzerland. There they have a large ring (several kilometers in diameter) that they use to study and discover small, new particles to learn more about how our Universe was created and what happened during the Big Bang. At CERN, they send protons in each direction in the ring with very high speed. They then collide, and then some antimatter is produced from the destroyed protons. The amount of antimatter produced, however, is a very small amount, and it will take millions of years before we get even 1 gram of antimatter! However, in the early Universe, very shortly after the Big Bang, there were extremely high amounts of antimatter. At that time, there were equally amounts of matter and antimatter (roughly 50% of each). There was, however, a small imbalance between them. For every 100 million antiparticles there were, there were 101 million particles. As you probably know, matter and antimatter have opposite charges, spin, color charges etc. If they touch each other, they get annihilated in a shower of pure energy. Albert Einstein figured out that there was much energy in matter, relating to his well known formula E= mc2. That's very high amounts of energy! If you had transformed 1 gram of matter into energy, you would have enough energy to power your house for 1 year. We're talking about lots of energy here! The superpowers used Einstein's formula to create fission bombs (atom bombs), and fusion bombs (hydrogen bombs). These converted only a small amount of matter into energy. If there had existed an antimatter bomb, all of the antimatter would have reacted to matter, thus converting all of the antimatter and the matter that reacted with it to energy. While an atom bomb only has an efficiency of 0,01%, a hydrogen bomb would have an efficiency of 1%. An antimatter bomb would have an efficiency of 100%!

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Wiki User

13y ago

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