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Why do matter and antimatter annihilate? (bigthink.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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From forming bound states to normal scattering, many possibilities abound for matter-antimatter interactions. So why do they annihilate? There’s a quantum reason we simply can’t avoid.

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[–] slurp 4 points 5 months ago (7 children)

That's what we genuinely don't know. Based on the standard model, it should be in equal parts.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (6 children)

Part of me is still half-convinced that there are whole galaxy clusters of antimatter that are simply too far away from other clusters to produce any noticeable gamma rays, and the reason they didn't interact near the beginning of the universe is the same reason the whole thing didn't collapse into a super massive black hole: we don't know yet, but probably along the same lines as dark energy. A lot of it did probably interact though and that's where a lot of the CMB comes from.

I'm definitely a lay person though, I'm sure an actual physicist can tell me that's definitely not the case, I just don't know why not yet.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Despite space being “empty” there’s still a surprising amount of stuff streaming through it. There are protons, electrons, carbon nuclei, etc constantly slamming into the Earth’s atmosphere, producing showers of radiation. These cosmic rays are the reason so many sensitive physics experiments ( like dark matter and neutrinoless double beta decay searches) are located deep underground. The earth is a good shield against these cosmic backgrounds.

Even if there was an “isolated” antimatter galaxy, it would get bombarded with matter in the form of cosmic rays. The annihilation photons are a really distinct signal that would be hard to miss. There are a number of gamma ray telescopes in space that map out sources of gammas, and they would have detected an antimatter galaxy if it existed.

If the antimatter galaxies are so far away that they’re beyond the visible universe, then there’s still the big question of why there was a segregation of matter and antimatter early on.

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