Physicists believe that everything in the universe is made up of three basic substancesThey are protons, neutrons, and electronsThe permutations and combinations of these three substances produce everything in the universe.
From Earth to Mars to the Andromeda Galaxy, and even to the edge of the universe, we can still see matter made of these three elementary particles, but for cosmologists there is a mystery: why is there so much positive matter in our universe and almost no antimatter?
This is the symmetry break, that is, the amount of positive matter and antimatter produced in the moment of the universe is different, and the positive matter is not completely annihilated, which gives rise to the universe we see.
Antimatter may sound like a concept in science fiction, but it's so real that it's a key part of the Standard Model of particle physics, 1932carl d. andersonAntimatter was detected for the first time in experiments conducted at the California Institute of Technology using cloud chambers and magnetic fields.
In terms of physical characteristics, antimatter is exactly the same as normal matter except for electrons, but it is precisely because the electrons of antimatter are opposite to normal matter, so they will cancel each other out, or annihilate, after contact, and release 100% of the mass into energy in the processIn comparison, the mass-energy conversion rate of nuclear fusion is only 07%。
Later studies showed that antimatter has exactly the same mass as ordinary particles, and when studying the effects of electromagnetic forces, experiments again found that they behave exactly the same as ordinary particles, except that the charges are opposite, but when physicists began to study weak interaction forces, they realized that there is an asymmetry between antimatter particles and normal particles.
Although antimatter behaves differently from matter in some ways, it has been an unsolved mystery to the scientific community as to whether it follows the same laws of gravity as matter, and physicists at CERN have conducted experiments to try to determine whether antimatter is pulled downward by gravity in the same way as matter, or whether it exhibits different gravitational properties.
In the Alpha experiment conducted by CERN, scientists obtained for the first time actual data on the gravitational acceleration of antimatter on the surface of the Earth, and the experimental results showed thatAbout 75% of the antihydrogen atoms escape through the bottom of the laboratory vessel, indicating that the antimatter is being pulled by gravity downward.
In other words, in the current situation, antimatter does not have anti-gravity, and it may only be regarded as an energy source with a 100% mass-energy conversion rate in the future, rather than a source of antigravity.
Although antimatter exhibits differences with matter in weak interactions, these differences are not enough to explain the great asymmetry between matter and antimatter in the universe, and we still don't know what exactly happened in the universe and why normal matter is more than antimatter.
If we can grasp the mechanism of the generation and annihilation of antimatter in the future, it may help us better understand the conditions of the early universe and the origin of the asymmetry between matter and antimatter, and the two biggest mysteries in the universe, dark matter and dark energy, may also have something to do with antimatter.
Antimatter touches on many fundamental questions in physics, from the origin and structure of the universe to the properties of elementary particles. With the advancement of experimental technology and the deepening of theoretical research, our understanding of antimatter will continue to improve, which may lead to revolutionary changes in physics and other scientific fields.
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