In the world of physics, each fundamental particle has its own antiparticles – a mirror double with opposite characteristics. At their meeting, annihilation occurs, releasing energy.
In science fiction, antiparticles serve as a source of energy for hyperdroders. There were assumptions that antiparticles could be repulsed by gravity or even move back in time. However, the new experiment in the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) has denied these speculations. It turned out that in the gravitational field antiparticles fall in the same way as ordinary particles.
The experiment was conducted by an international group of scientists called Alpha. They created about 100 hydrogen anti-atoms and supported them in a magnetic field. When the field decreased, the anti-atoms fell at the same accelerated speed as ordinary atoms. The results of the study were published in the journal Nature.
These results did not become a revelation for scientists. According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, all forms of matter and energy react equally to gravity. Despite this, the experiment was necessary, since its opposite outcome could radically change our understanding of physics.
Interest in antiparticles arose in 1928, when physicist Paul Dirac discovered that the equation describing electrons has two solutions: one with a negative charge and the other with a positive one. This positively charged particle was called the positron.
Over the past 20 years, scientists from the Alpha Group have gathered antimatter in CERN. They studied hydrogen anti-atoms to check the hypotheses about the nature of antiparticles.
However, the question remains: why did not the full annihilation of matter and antimatter occur after the big explosion? Why does our universe consist exclusively of matter? This question has remained open for almost a century.