Does antimatter exist?

In science fiction, antimatter powers warp engines to allow faster-than-light space travel And makes a fearsome weapon to destroy the Vatican in Angels & Demons

Antimatter definitely exists And they really do make tiny amounts of it at CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider

Every type of particle of matter has an antimatter counterpart They are identical mirror- images, apart from having opposite charges For electrons there are positrons, and protons have antiprotons… If you put a positron and an antiproton together you get a molecule of anti-hydrogen This is what they can make at CERN

Antimatter is very tricky to handle, because matter and antimatter just don’t get on When an antimatter particle touches a matter particle they are both wiped out in a flash of energy At CERN they can only keep positrons and antiprotons briefly in an elaborate magnetic trap [Google]

When the universe began in the Big Bang, equal amounts of matter and antimatter were created But now there is no antimatter left that we can find, anywhere So the real question is: where did it go? [CERN]

One of the four huge experiments at the LHC, the LHCb, records what happens when protons collide with enough energy to create pairs of matter and antimatter quarks The LHCb scientists are trying to find any tiny difference between them that could explain why matter got the upper hand over antimatter at the beginning of the universe [CERN]

There’s no chance of making an antimatter bomb, though It takes way more energy to make mere particles of the antimatter than you get out when it’s annihilated with matter!

Not really. In 10 years, CERN has made just about a billionth of a gram of antimatter Enough to power a light bulb for a few minutes [CERN]

Click on the link below to view the science facts and fiction of Angels & Demons a book by Dan Brown Click on the image or the link below to view a video short called Hunting Beauty ers/Spotlight/SpotlightAandD-en.html