can anybody explain the basic principle of antimatter??

Question

just curious....

Answer 1

hahaha! antimater is so cool!

It's like this... imagine that each electron in the universe is a cookie. Quantum mechanics says that there is a huge sheet of un-cut cookie dough present at every point in the universe. So, one way you can MAKE an electron is by punching out a cookie from the un-cut dough. This would leave you with 1 cookie, and 1 hole in the dough. we call the hole in the dough an "anti-electron" or a "positron", and it acts JUST LIKE its punched-out counterpart except that it has opposite characteristics: it has an equal and opposite charge and spin.

anyway, if the positron and the electron ever meet, it's like putting the cookie back in the hole, and it releases all of the energy that was put into the cookie to punch it out originally.

so all antimatter is, is holes in the "dirac sea" (the word physicists use to describe the un-cut cookie dough). they act the same as regular matter, except that they have opposite charges and stuff.

Answer 2

Antimatter is a fancy sounding name for something
rather unremarkable. A particle's antiparticle has some
things the same as the particle (for example mass and spin)
and some opposite (lepton number and charge for example).

An anti-electron (called a positron) is an electron with opposite charge and lepton number but the same mass and spin etc.

Some particles, like the photon, are their own antiparticle.
But composite particles like the neutron, even though
chargeless, are not their own antiparticle.

There is nothing that odd about antiparticles. They are normal
particles and exist naturally all around the universe. Antimatter,
however (made from antiparticles)
is much rarer since, at least in our area of the universe, it
is unstable due to the large presence of matter with which
it likes to annihilate.

Answer 3

Simply put, antimatter is a fundamental particle of regular matter with its electrical charge reversed. The common proton has an antimatter counterpart called the antiproton. It has the same mass but an opposite charge. The electron's counterpart is called a positron.

Antimatter particles are created in ultra high-speed collisions.

Answer 4

Antimatter is just what it sounds like, the opposite of matter. Everything in the universe has an opposite, and that includes matter, which makes up everything we know. When matter is created it's opposite is also created which is antimatter. I guess it is also suppposed to be explosive when it meets it's opposite, matter. In theory

Answer 5

Antimatter is matter that is composed of the antiparticles of those that constitute normal matter. In 1929-31, Paul Dirac put forward a theory that for each type of particle, there is an antiparticle for which each additive quantum number has the negative of the value it has for the normal matter particle. The sign reversal applies only to quantum numbers (properties) which are additive, such as charge, but not to mass, for example. So, the antiparticle of the normal electron is called the positron, as it has a positive charge, but the same mass as the electron. An atom of antihydrogen, for instance, is composed of a negatively-charged antiproton being orbited by a positively-charged positron. Paul Dirac's theory has been experimentally verified and today a wide range of antiparticles have been detected. This is one of the few examples of a fundamental particle being predicted in theory and later discovered by experiment. If a particle/antiparticle pair comes in contact with each other, the two annihilate and produce a burst of energy, which may manifest itself in the form of other particles and antiparticles or electromagnetic radiation. In these reactions, rest mass is not conserved, although (as in any other reaction), mass-energy is conserved.

Scientists in 1995 succeeded in producing anti-atoms of hydrogen, and also antideuteron nuclei, made out of an antiproton and an antineutron, but no anti-atom more complex than antideuteron has been created yet. In principle, sufficiently large quantities of antimatter could produce anti-nuclei of other elements, which would have exactly the same properties as their positive-matter counterparts. However, such a "periodic table of anti-elements" is thought to be, at best, highly unlikely, as the quantities of antimatter required would be, quite literally, astronomical.

Antiparticles are created elsewhere in the universe where there are high-energy particle collisions, such as in the center of our galaxy, but none have been detected that are residual from the Big Bang, as most normal matter is [1] (http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2000/ast29may_1m.htm). The unequal distribution between matter and antimatter in the universe has long been a mystery. The solution likely lies in the violation of CP-symmetry by the laws of nature [2] (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2159498.stm).

Positrons and antiprotons can individually be stored in a device called a Penning trap, which uses a combination of magnetic field and electric fields to hold charged particles in a vacuum. Two international collaborations (ATRAP and ATHENA) used these devices to store thousands of slowly moving antihydrogen atoms in 2002. It is the goal of these collaborations to probe the energy level structure of antihydrogen to compare it with that of hydrogen as a test of the CPT theorem. One way to do this is to confine the anti-atoms in an inhomogenous magnetic field (one cannot use electric fields since the anti-atom is neutral) and interrogate them with lasers. If the anti-atoms have too much kinetic energy they will be able to escape the magnetic trap, and it is therefore essential that the anti-atoms are produced with as little energy as possible. This is the key difference between the antihydrogen that ATRAP and ATHENA produced, which was made at very low temperatures, and the antihydrogen produced in 1995 which was moving at a speed close to the speed of light.

Antimatter/matter reactions have practical applications in medical imaging, see Positron emission tomography (PET). In some kinds of beta decay, a nuclide loses surplus positive charge by emitting a positron (in the same event, a proton becomes a neutron, and neutrinos are also given off). Nuclides with surplus positive charge are easily made in a cyclotron and are widely generated for medical use.

Answer 6

the basic definition of anti-matter is mass without weight in theory a quantum or an indivisible unit of energy, equal for radiation of frequency v to the product hv , where h is plancks constant further further theory involves the breaking down of sub atomic mass to sub catagories until a mass unit with out weight is found .i.e. the -anti-quark could also be sub-atomic phenomenom that controls atomic forces just hypothosis

Answer 7

Anti-matter is exactly the same as regular matter except for electrical charge. For example, the electron has a negative charge, while it's anti-matter counterpart (...the positron) has a positive charge.

Answer 8

I can't top the excellent answer by Kanajlo, but if you want to learn more I suggest you apply to study at Whatsamatta U.

Answer 9

All about matter and anti matter is equal.
There is one thing very special: when matter and anti matter meet each other, they 'eat' each other and you get energy according to E = mc2 in which m is the lost mass plus anti mass.

Answer 10

It is like uncle matter but it has 2 X chromosomes.

TFTP