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Scientists assembling one of the elements of an LHC detector
How did the universe begin
What gives Matter Mass
What is Gravity
What is Dark Matter
Does Animatter Exist
Are there other dimensions
Does antimatter exist

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Yes. The big question is: where did it all go?

In theory, every particle of matter can have a corresponding mirror-image antiparticle, with the same mass but the opposite charge. So, protons have antiprotons and electrons have antielectrons (called positrons for historical reasons). Put them together and you get molecules of antihydrogen.

Scientists at CERN routinely make tiny amounts of antihydrogen, and try to see if it behaves in the way the theory predicts it should. The rub is that antimatter and matter annihilate on contact in a flash of energy. This makes antimatter a bit tricky to handle - you can't just stick it in a bottle made of normal matter.

Stable antimatter doesn't exist in our universe now. The early universe was very different. It consisted of a quark-gluon plasma together with all the other elementary particles. It is thought that matter and antimatter particles were being continuously created and annihilated in collisions in these incredibly hot, dense conditions. At some point there came to be a very slight excess of quarks and leptons (matter particles) over anti-quarks and anti-leptons (antimatter particles). This led to matter becoming dominant over antimatter in today's universe. Why there should be this asymmetry of matter and antimatter is one of the great unsolved mysteries in physics.

One of the detectors at the LHC- the LHCb detector- is devoted to the job of cracking this mystery. Lead nuclei, accelerated to almost the speed of light, are collided head-on inside the detector. The collision has enough energy to recreate the conditions of the early universe, including antimatter particles. Studying what happens to these should help our understanding of how nature could tell the difference between matter and antimatter in the early moments of the universe, and favour one over the other.

The entertainment industry gets good value out of antimatter as a concept. The fact that it releases so much energy when it annihilates with matter has been used to power starship warp engines, generate boundless pollution-free energy and create awesome weapons. Given that you don't find antimatter just lying around, you have to make it. The reality is that it takes huge amounts of energy to create the tiniest amounts of antimatter, far more than the energy released when it touches matter. The figures don't stack up, so it looks like these applications of antimatter will remain science fiction.

Hopefully the reason why we have a matter universe, rather than an antimatter universe, will soon be ticked off the list of deep mysteries that keep physicists up at nights�

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