According to theory, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts at the big bang – yet our universe is almost entirely made of matter
New Scientist Live
Angels and Demons, Dan Brown, Pocket Books
IT WAS not so long ago that we were hearing how CERN's Large Hadron Collider would produce planet-destroying black holes. Now a movie based on Dan Brown's blockbuster, due to hit the big screen next month, provides us with another supposed danger emanating from the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland: antimatter, the seed of a weapon of unsurpassed destructive power.
While Brown's take on antimatter is fictional, the stuff itself certainly isn't. We see its signature in cosmic rays, and it is routinely made in high-energy collisions inside particle smashers the world over. In hospitals, radioactive molecules that emit antimatter particles are used for imaging in the technique known as positron emission tomography.
Brown was right about one thing, though: if you want to find out more about antimatter, CERN is the place to go. In this special feature, we explain how experiments at the laboratory are helping to answer some of our more pressing questions about this most elusive of substances.
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Neutral particles can have antiparticles, too. The neutron might have no charge, but quarks - the smaller particles that make it up - do. Turn these quarks into antiquarks by flipping their charges, and you've made an antineutron.
See a diagram of the types of antimatter humanity can make
The possibility of antimatter first surfaced in equations formulated by British theoretical physicist Paul Dirac in 1928 - four years before American experimenter Carl Anderson found positrons in cosmic rays.
Notoriously, matter and antimatter destroy each other, or annihilate, whenever they come into contact. An electron and a positron mutually destruct in a puff of light consisting of two photons sent out in precisely opposite directions, each with an energy corresponding exactly to the mass of the electron (and positron).