What Is Antimatter?

What is Antimatter? What does it do? Is it dangerous? Is it helpful? All these questions are important but in order for Antimatter to be researched, it first must be contained. Antimatter has a unique property though since when it touches any matter it vanishes. That reaction is called annihilation and a productive property about annihilation is that it produces energy (usually in the form of photons). Many people nowadays wonder how it can benefit society. Could it be used for medicinal purposes? Could it be used for war? Funny thing is though; it already is being used today in the world of medicine to help sick cancer patients and more. Though it may seem like a straight forward question "How do you contain Antimatter?" you must first know a bit about Antimatter in order to fully grasp the gravity of the situation. Antimatter has always been there and has been speculated about for almost a whole century now. Billion dollar projects have been made in order to create and further our knowledge of Antimatter such as a Large Hadron Collider. Antimatter though must be contained in order for all the research to take place though, which is through the use of magnetic forces.

Keywords: Antimatter, Annihilation, Large Hadron Colliders

Antimatter and its Containment

In the world of physics and science, everything boils down to about one thing; quarks. Humans are made of cells, cells are made of molecules, and molecules are made of atoms which are composed of quarks. Yet what is strange about quarks is that their electric charge, mass, spin, and interactions determine what kind of quark they are. There are six types of quarks (known as flavors); up, down, strange, charm, bottom and top. Up and down are the key ones to look at since they are the only ones that have the exact mass to be stable quarks (since their mass decays over time). The key part for the difference between up and down is their charge and since up is positive and down is negative, what happens when the charges/signs are changed? This has been a question sought out by scientists for ages and just tossed aside as a fantasy by most. Yet over time scientists were able to overcome this obstacle as technology advanced and humanity's knowledge increased. (Nave, 2008)

In 1928 a physicist by the name of Paul Dirac wrote an equation that exhibited the components of particles and showed how electrons were one component, yet there was a blank spot. Two of the answers led to the explanation of an electron with a negative charge yet there were still two more solutions that were not negative electrons (Martinez, Tanner, & Stephens, 2003). Four years later a scientist by the name of Carl Anderson found proof of a positron (an anti-electron) with his cosmic ray detector because positrons leave traces that they existed in the form of energy (Giacomelli & Poli, 2006). Eventually the answer was established that each particle had a counterpart of the original particle. An example of this is a positron, (an antielectron) which is an opposite version of an electron. Eventually when particle accelerators came into existence a separate one was made by the name of Project Beauty (CERN, 2008). It was specially designed to create antiparticles that could be analyzed for science. A couple years later, an opposite version