Can you contain antimatter

For electrically neutral anti-particles or anti-atoms, the situation is even more difficult. It is impossible to use constant electric or magnetic fields to contain neutral antimatter, because these fields have no effect on the particles at all.

When antimatter comes into contact with matter it annihilates: the mass of the particle and its antiparticle are converted into pure energy. But can this energy be harnessed in some useful way?

Any contact between a particle and its anti-particle leads to their immediate annihilation Large-scale annihilation of antimatter and matter could theoretically be used in a destructive way - but could it be used to make a bomb? Skip to main content. Electrically charged anti-particles Portable antimatter traps, as seen in the movie, are not feasible in reality. One theory suggests that more normal matter was created than antimatter in the beginning, so that even after mutual annihilation there was enough normal matter left to form stars, galaxies and us.

Dirac put together Einstein's special relativity equation which says light is the fastest-moving thing in the universe and quantum mechanics which describes what happens in an atom , according to the magazine. He discovered the equation worked for electrons with negative charge or with positive charges. While Dirac was at first hesitant about sharing his findings, he eventually embraced them and said that every particle in the universe would have a mirror image.

American physicist Carl D. Anderson discovered positrons in Dirac received a Nobel Prize in Physics in , and Anderson got the prize in When antimatter particles interact with matter particles, they annihilate each other and produce energy.

This has led engineers to speculate that antimatter-powered spacecraft might be an efficient way to explore the universe. While research can get by on a lot less antimatter, this is the minimum that would be needed for application. Power generation creates another headache: "It costs far more energy to create antimatter than the energy one could get back from an antimatter reaction.

But that hasn't stopped NASA and other groups from working to improve the technology to make antimatter spacecraft possible. How did matter form? What and where is antimatter? Antimatter in CMS Are there more particles left to find?

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