What’s the Matter With Antimatter?

Mercury, November/December 2005 Table of Contents

Courtesy of the AIP.

by Andrew Willey

Much as we might like to think we understand something of the nature of the Universe, we actually confront a profound universal mystery. At present, the very set of laws we have created to describe it—the so-called Standard Model—suggests that the Universe, or at least its contents, should not exist.

From its Big Bang beginning, the Universe was filled completely with energy. When this energy cooled as the Universe expanded, matter condensed out of the chaotic soup to form galaxies, stars, and eventually our own planet Earth. Current theories of charge conservation and pair production, however, insist that for every piece of ordinary matter created in the Big Bang, there must be an equal and opposite amount of antimatter. And, as every fan of Star Trek knows, exposing matter to antimatter results in the destruction of both and, consequently, the release of tremendous amounts of raw energy.

Thus, according to the vaunted Standard Model, our Universe should have been a stillborn one, each new matter particle quickly annihilating its antimatter opposite, but even a quick glance around is enough to prove that this is not the case. So what happened to all this antimatter?

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