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Physics news
60 second ANTIMATTER
ANTIMATTER is made up of particles with equal but opposite characteristics of everyday particles of matter. Consider this analogy: dig a hole, and make a hill with the earth you’ve excavated. Hole and hill have equal but opposite characteristics-the volume of the earth in the hill, and that of the hole where the earth was removed. For particles, properties like electrical charge are opposite to their antiparticles-one positive, one negative. Also, antimatter will annihilate its matter counterpart in a burst of energy, just like the hill will fill the hole, leaving neither.
The universe seems to contain no significant amounts of antimatter, despite expectations that both should have been created equally during the big bang. So where did all the antimatter go? On possible explanation could be a subtle and unexpected difference in the properties of matter and antimatter, leading to a slight excess of matter which survived the initial cataclysm of matter-antimatter annihilation.
Experimenters at CERN,. Fermilab, SLAC and KEK are producing antimatter in particle accelerators to search for and study this difference. Antimatter also has real-life medical applications, such as positron emission tomography-PET scans. But because producing antimatter even in minuscule quantities is very difficult, it will unfortunately never power any future Starship Enterprise.
Michael Doser, CERN
from symmetry
The universe seems to contain no significant amounts of antimatter, despite expectations that both should have been created equally during the big bang. So where did all the antimatter go? On possible explanation could be a subtle and unexpected difference in the properties of matter and antimatter, leading to a slight excess of matter which survived the initial cataclysm of matter-antimatter annihilation.
Experimenters at CERN,. Fermilab, SLAC and KEK are producing antimatter in particle accelerators to search for and study this difference. Antimatter also has real-life medical applications, such as positron emission tomography-PET scans. But because producing antimatter even in minuscule quantities is very difficult, it will unfortunately never power any future Starship Enterprise.
Michael Doser, CERN
from symmetry
60 Second QUARKS
QUARKS
Quarks are fundamental building blocks of matter. They are most commonly found inside protons and neutrons, the particles that make up the core of each atom in the universe. Based on current experimental evidence, quarks seem to be truly fundamental particles; they cannot be further subdivided.
Protons and neutrons mainly contain two types of quarks. These are called up and down quarks. For reasons still unknown, nature also designed two copies of each of the up and down quarks, identical except for having larger masses. The heavier copies of the quark are called charm and top quarks; the copies of the down quark are named strange and bottom quarks. Converting energy into mass, accelerators produce these heavier, short-lived quarks through particle collisions.
Quark masses span an enormous range. The heaviest quark is the top quark, which is about 100,000 times more massive than the two lightest types, up and down. The explanation for this hierarchy is a deep mystery, but the top quark’s huge mass could turn out to be a virtue. Probing the detailed properties of the top may shed light on the origins of mass itself in the universe.
JAY HUBISZ, Fermilab
Quarks are fundamental building blocks of matter. They are most commonly found inside protons and neutrons, the particles that make up the core of each atom in the universe. Based on current experimental evidence, quarks seem to be truly fundamental particles; they cannot be further subdivided.
Protons and neutrons mainly contain two types of quarks. These are called up and down quarks. For reasons still unknown, nature also designed two copies of each of the up and down quarks, identical except for having larger masses. The heavier copies of the quark are called charm and top quarks; the copies of the down quark are named strange and bottom quarks. Converting energy into mass, accelerators produce these heavier, short-lived quarks through particle collisions.
Quark masses span an enormous range. The heaviest quark is the top quark, which is about 100,000 times more massive than the two lightest types, up and down. The explanation for this hierarchy is a deep mystery, but the top quark’s huge mass could turn out to be a virtue. Probing the detailed properties of the top may shed light on the origins of mass itself in the universe.
JAY HUBISZ, Fermilab