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In particle physics, annihilation is the process that occurs when a subatomic particle collides with its respective antiparticle to produce other particles, such as an electron colliding with a positron to produce two photons. [1]
Antimatter cannot be stored in a container made of ordinary matter because antimatter reacts with any matter it touches, annihilating itself and an equal amount of the container. Antimatter in the form of charged particles can be contained by a combination of electric and magnetic fields, in a device called a Penning trap .
Antimatter's rarity and tendency to annihilate when brought into contact with matter makes its study a technically demanding task. Furthermore, gravity is much weaker than the other fundamental forces , for reasons still of interest to physicists, complicating efforts to study gravity in systems small enough to be feasibly created in lab ...
All the particles that make up the matter around us, such electrons and protons, have antimatter versions which are nearly identical, but with mirrored properties such as the opposite electric charge.
An antimatter weapon is a theoretically possible device using antimatter as a power source, a propellant, or an explosive for a weapon.Antimatter weapons are currently too costly and unreliable to be viable in warfare, as producing antimatter is enormously expensive (estimated at US$6 billion for every 100 nanograms), the quantities of antimatter generated are very small, and current ...
Recent theoretical framework for negative mass and repulsive gravity (antigravity) between matter and antimatter has been developed, and the theory is compatible with CPT theorem. [9] When antihydrogen comes into contact with ordinary matter, its constituents quickly annihilate. The positron annihilates with an electron to produce gamma rays.
After most of the matter and antimatter was annihilated, what remained was all the baryonic matter in the current universe, along with a much greater number of bosons. Experiments reported in 2010 at Fermilab, however, seem to show that this imbalance is much greater than previously assumed. [7]
As a result, it becomes much easier to produce particles such as neutrinos that interact only weakly with other matter. The heaviest particle pairs yet produced by electron–positron annihilation in particle accelerators are W + – W − pairs (mass 80.385 GeV/c 2 × 2). The heaviest single-charged particle is the Z boson (mass 91.188 GeV/c 2).