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'''Antimatter''' is matter composed of antiparticles — particles carrying the same mass as their ordinary counterparts but opposite electric charge and opposite values of the other additive quantum numbers. When a particle meets its antiparticle the pair can annihilate, converting their rest mass into radiation.

==The standard account==

Antimatter entered physics through Dirac's 1928 relativistic wave equation for the electron, whose solutions included negative-energy states. Dirac's initial interpretation was a filled "sea" of negative-energy states whose holes appeared as positive particles; by 1931 he had identified the hole as a new particle of electronic mass and opposite charge. Carl Anderson found it in cloud-chamber cosmic-ray tracks in 1932 and named it the positron. The antiproton followed at the Bevatron in 1955, and antihydrogen atoms were first assembled at CERN in 1995, with trapped antihydrogen produced by the ALPHA experiment from 2010 onward.

Annihilation is the practical signature: an electron and a positron at rest annihilate into two 511 keV gamma rays, the basis of positron emission tomography. Antimatter is routinely produced in accelerators and in cosmic-ray showers, and appears in beta-plus decay.

The genuine open problem is the '''baryon asymmetry''': the observed universe is made almost entirely of matter, yet the standard hot [[Big Bang]] picture starts from conditions that should have produced matter and antimatter in nearly equal amounts. CP violation, discovered in neutral kaon decays in 1964, is real but too small to account for the asymmetry, and the Sakharov conditions for baryogenesis are not satisfied by the [[Standard Model]] alone. Whether antimatter falls up or down under gravity was an open experimental question until very recently, when CERN's ALPHA-g experiment reported that antihydrogen falls downward.

==On this wiki==

The baryon asymmetry is the point at which researchers catalogued here most often break from the standard account, and they break in opposite directions.

One group keeps the symmetry and disposes of the annihilation. [[Alfredo Bennun]]'s ''[[The Arrow of Time and the Avoidance of Primordial Annihilation]]'' argues that the primordial particle–antiparticle symmetry need not have been violated at all: if neutrinos and antineutrinos decoupled at a temperature well above 1 MeV, the antineutrinos could carry the antimatter quantum numbers out of the interacting system without annihilating, leaving a matter-dominated visible universe with no initial CP violation required — and with the irreversibility of that separation supplying an arrow of time.

A second group posits an antimatter counterpart universe. [[Glen W Deen]]'s ''[[Neutron Gravity and the Anti-universe]]'' proposes that space flows into this universe through neutrons and out through antineutrons, so that every body has a concentric antimatter twin in which time runs backwards. [[Ruggero Maria Santilli]]'s ''[[Isodual Theory of Antimatter: with applications to Antigravity, Grand Unification and Cosmology (Fundamental Theories of Physics)]]'' develops a formal "isodual" mathematics in which antimatter is the image of matter under an anti-Hermitean map, with predicted consequences for [[:Category:Antigravity|antigravity]] and cosmology. [[Arnold G Gulko]]'s ''[[Comments on the Paradox of Antimatter]]'' (''[[The Toth-Maatian Review]]'', 1986) is an earlier statement of the puzzle from within this community.

A third group denies that antimatter is a separate kind of substance at all, and rebuilds ordinary matter out of electrons and positrons. [[Don L Hotson]]'s two-part ''[[Dirac's Equation and the Sea of Negative Energy, Part 2|Dirac's Equation and the Sea of Negative Energy]]'' (''[[Infinite Energy]]'', 2002) argues that Dirac's equation was truncated rather than superseded — that its discarded negative-energy solutions describe real "epo" electron–positron pairs from which all other particles and the vacuum itself are built. [[Ernest J Sternglass]] pursued a closely related programme, summarised in ''[[Recent Evidence for a Relativistic Electron-Positron Model for Matter and Its Implications for Cosmology]]'' and in his book ''[[Before the Big Bang: The Origins of the Universe]]'', in which composite electron–positron pairs are the seed of both particle structure and cosmology.

Finally, [[Dragan Slavkov Hajdukovic]] takes the gravitational question directly: if particles and antiparticles carry gravitational charges of opposite sign, the virtual pairs of the [[Vacuum|quantum vacuum]] act as gravitational dipoles, and the polarisation of that vacuum by ordinary matter could mimic [[Dark Matter|dark matter]] without any dark matter existing. The ALPHA-g result weighs against the negative-gravitational-mass assumption this requires.

==See also==
* [[Vacuum]]
* [[Electron]]
* [[Standard Model]]
* [[Big Bang]]
* [[Dark Matter]]

[[Category:Particle Physics]]
[[Category:Structure]]
[[Category:Cosmology]]
[[Category:Big Bang]]

Antimatter - Revision history

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