Antimatter

Antimatter, is the mirror/time-reversed-entity of the negative baryonic matter. It was only a second exactly after big bang that the universe began flooding with particles - and after 300 million years, a multitude of stars exploded, forming the planets and new stars, creating the superspiral galaxies we can observe to this day. However, a problem arises - it is 'the' quintessential paradox concerning the creation of matter.

Planets, stars, even entire galaxies should not even be here! When ordinary matter came out of spacetime, an equal amount of 'antimatter'. Antimatter is the mirror image of ordinary matter, but with opposite properties in their electrical charge. Because of this unique difference, whenever antimatter comes into contact with ordinary matter, the annihilate each other in a catastrophic burst of energy (the kind of energy or gamma rays everything originated from) - they would explode, strangely enough, with twice as much energy as the particles contained. When an antiparticle comes into contact with a normal particle they produce two deadly photons. The reason why two photons are the result is that for antiparticles have no net momentum, while a single photon will always have momentum. Conservation laws thus say that two photons must be created with zero-net momentum. Paul A. M. Dirac discovered the existence of antimatter, purely by mathematical reasoning. He found that whenever a particle pops into existence, let's say, by simply adding enough energy into the vacuum of space, it will force the virtual particle to be real and as it emerges into real space, it leaves behind a hole - this too is a particle - its antipartner. He got a Nobel Prize for his discovery...

Thus when all matter and antimatter formed, they should have eliminated each other, leaving behind a universe with nothing but a brilliant glow. Yet, reality proves this is not the case. Truth is, we haven't got a substantial amount of antimatter in our universe. However, it is thought there will be entire 'antigalaxies', with 'antistars' and 'antiplanets' that have never came into contact with normal matter. There is undeniably more matter than antimatter - but this seems like a contradictory statement, especially when both types of matter had to be created in equal proportion. No one is sure how this can be possible - however, some physicists say that the excess matter survived annihilation because their antipartners are not their complete opposites. This was first discovered in the 1964 by physicists James Cronin and Val Vitch, who won a Nobel Prize on the work done on the particle called the 'Kaon.' Physicists now believe that the Kaon lives longer than the 'Antikaon.' This differential life expectancy might answer why there appears to be a lot more matter than antimatter - however, this is just an educated guess made by physicists - and nothing is set in stone.

Physicists are going to start up the biggest scientific project the world has ever seen in Geneva. The Large Hadron Collider (L.H.C.) will shoot particles against each other, and the results are hopefully going answer some gaping questions involving particle physics.

A particle, traveling shy of the speed of light, will make 11,000 laps of its 17 mile long collider in just under one second! It is so big, half lies in Switzerland and the other half lies in France. In one round, the L.H.C. will use enough energy to power half a million homes. Some of the scientists hope that the project will answer the existence of the mysterious 'Higgs Boson', predicted by the standard model - and also answer the gaping questions of dark matter and antimatter. Professor John Ellis, working for CERN says, 'it will be embarrassing if we do not detect the Higgs Boson - but whatever it is we will find, we are sure it will be new.'

What is the Higgs Boson? The Higgs Boson is a massive 'scalar elementary particle', hypothesized by the British physicist Peter Higgs. It is the only particle predicted by the standard model that has not been seen as of yet. The particle itself however, as illusive as it has been, will influence every other particle in the universe - it will explain why anything should have mass, especially the existence of the massless photon boson and heavy W and Z bosons. The particle itself is one component of something called the 'Higgs Field.' This invisible force field will propagate throughout all matter providing them their masses, even providing mass for the Higgs Boson itself. The Higgs Boson will not succeed the masses of the particles it generates. This means it will have a mass of at least 1 TeV (teraelectron-vault). If you look at the diagram, there is a Feynman model showing the hypothetical decay of two gluon particles into two top-antitop quark pairs that merge to make a neutral Higgs Boson. The Higgs Boson, for the main 'mass-giving' properties has also been dubbed as 'The God Particle.'