8. Matter Vs Anti-Matter

We know that matter is made up of subatomic particles such as protons, neutrons & electrons and they, in turn, are also made up of tiny particles called quarks. All these are referred as matter. Then what is Anti-Matter? Originally it sounded to me like something opposite to the matter, probably like spirits or ghosts. In fact, antimatter is also a matter. It's just another set of particles that also belongs to the subatomic world. In 1932, anti-electrons were discovered by Carl D. Anderson even though the term was already used by Arthur Schuster in 1898.

What is anti-electron? Is it some spirit form of electron matter?! No, not at all. It's also an electron but with a positive charge! Usually laymen like me get confused that a particle with positive charge is a proton, isn't it?! Yes, but there are other differences. Protons are also heavier than electrons. So when we say anti-electron, it means an electron but with positive charge! Anti-electrons were found and eventually named as 'Positrons' by Carl D. Anderson himself.

Like matter, apart from the electric charge, antimatter also also have their spins. Spin is a unit-less attribute. It refers the angular momentum of the particle. In fact, in real subatomic world, no particles spin to right or left. Feynman referred spin as the direction of time in which particles move! Forward or Backward! This actually leads to further confusions and questions about time! So, the standard way of seeing the direction of spin remains clockwise and anticlockwise to avoid further complications on 'Time'.

Creation:
Antiparticles are created everywhere in the universe where high-energy particle collisions take place. High-energy cosmic rays impacting Earth like atmosphere produce antiparticles, which are immediately annihilated by contact with nearby matter. Antiparticles are also produced in any environment with a sufficiently high temperature where mean particle energy greater than the pair production threshold.

1. Positrons were reported^[11] in November 2008 to have been generated by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in larger numbers than by any previous synthetic process. A laser drove ionized electrons through a millimeter radius gold target's nuclei, which caused the incoming electrons to emit energy quanta, that decayed into both matter and antimatter.
2.  In 1995 CERN announced that it had successfully brought into existence nine antihydrogen atoms by implementing the SLAC/Fermilab concept during the PS210 experiment.
3. A small number of antihelium-3 (³He) nuclei have been created in collision experiments.

Interaction:
a positron (the antiparticle of the electron) and an antiproton can form an antihydrogen atom in the same way that an electron and a proton form a normal matter hydrogen atom. Antimatter that is composed of charged particles can be contained by a combination of an electric field and a magnetic field in a device known as a Penning trap. There are also particles with no charge, for which atomic traps are used. In particular, such a trap may use the dipole moment of the trapped particles; at high vacuum, the matter or antimatter particles can be trapped and cooled with slightly off-resonant laser radiation because just an intensive laser beam also could suspend few small antimatter particles.

Annihilation:
Mixing matter and antimatter can lead to the annihilation of both by giving rise to high-energy photons. Antimatter cannot be stored in a container made of ordinary matter because antimatter reacts with any matter it touches, annihilating itself and an equal amount of the matter, I mean the container.

Before we conclude, lets consider the positive beta decay. We had seen this activity in the previous post while talking about strong force. While proton decays into neutron, it releases positron with it's positive charge if there is enough energy is available. Antimatter is the byproduct of fundamental interactions. Even though we try to create antimatter for medical and scientific uses because of its high energy states, antimatter is not easily reproducible and stored in matter based environment and hence antimatter can exist in abundance to form antimolecules only in burning star or center of the galaxy where the energy is too high.

Conclusion:
On Earth, antimatter always ends upon annihilation with matter considering how much it costs if we try to protect them from matter and produce them in abundance! However given such high temperature and pressures, there is almost zero possibility of forming matter like us. In order to form the matter like the one on Earth, temperature should be drastically low and water should be formed.

Provided these facts, I could only think of some organisms(!), which are made up of antiparticles with high energy, can live at those high temperatures and pressures. Would that be some kind of spirit form!? Even if it is true, then it will not be the same as the spirit form of living being that is defined by worldly religions! Hence antimatter is not the idea that a meta-physicist would be interested in to explain the spiritualistic view of our world!