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RE: Probing antimatter in its deepest details at CERN

in #steemstem7 years ago

I was so enamored with my joke, I forgot to ask my actual question.

Let's make the big supposition that we could make buckets of stable antiatoms. If I understand CPT's implications well enough, this means all the emergent properties of matter would be the same for antimatter - stuff like, 2 antihydrogens + 1 antioxygen would make antiwater, fusion and fission would be a thing, and the reaction products would be the same (although the anti-version). Is that correct?

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This is correct :)

So, what your'e saying is that I could be a particle physicist? Sweet!

Next serious question. If antihydrogen has the same spectral lines and such, is there any way we could detect it from afar apart from looking for matter/antimatter collisions?

I've googled this a bit and it seems like the answer is 'not really, but if you're thinking about antimatter galaxies, lots of stuff about the early universe suggests that antimatter and matter existed in equal amounts, but we're clearly seeing a lot of matter, so the antimatter must've been annihilated.'

I don't think I fully get it, since that seems like a case of circular reasoning and I'm pretty sure it's not supposed to be.

:)

Next serious question. If antihydrogen has the same spectral lines and such, is there any way we could detect it from afar apart from looking for matter/antimatter collisions?

I am not sure to understand the question. Antihydrogen must be produced and this is tough. Producing it means detecting it, somehow, as we know what we produce (and we then observe what is going on.

I've googled this a bit and it seems like the answer is 'not really, but if you're thinking about antimatter galaxies, lots of stuff about the early universe suggests that antimatter and matter existed in equal amounts, but we're clearly seeing a lot of matter, so the antimatter must've been annihilated.'

There is a limit on the amount of antimatter in the universe. It is of the order of at most 0.01%. We could have that amount of antimatter and still be in agreement with data.