Matter and Antimatter

There is such a thing as an antimatter trap -

To study antimatter, you need to prevent it from annihilating with matter. Scientists have created ways to do just that.Charged antimatter particles such as positrons and antiprotons can be held in devices called Penning traps. These are comparable to tiny accelerators. Inside, particles spiral around as the magnetic and electric fields keep them from colliding with the walls of the trap.

But Penning traps won’t work on neutral particles such as antihydrogen. Because they have no charge, these particles cannot be confined by electric fields. Instead, they are held in Ioffe traps, which work by creating a region of space where the magnetic field gets larger in all directions. The particle gets stuck in the area with the weakest magnetic field, much like a marble rolling around the bottom of a bowl.

Earth’s magnetic field can also act as a sort of antimatter trap. Antiprotons have been found in zones around the Earth called Van Allen radiation belts.

Antimatter might fall up -

Antimatter and matter particles have the same mass but differ in properties such as electric charge and spin. The Standard Model predicts that gravity should have the same effect on matter and antimatter; however, this has yet to be seen. Experiments such as AEGIS, ALPHA and GBAR are hard at work trying to find out.
Observing gravity’s effect on antimatter is not quite as easy as watching an apple fall from a tree. These experiments need to hold antimatter in a trap or slow it down by cooling it to temperatures just above absolute zero. And because gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces, physicists must use neutral antimatter particles in these experiments to prevent interference by the more powerful electrical force.

Antimatter is studied in particle decelerators -

You’ve heard of particle accelerators, but did you know there were also particle decelerators? CERN houses a machine called the Antiproton Decelerator, a storage ring that can capture and slow antiprotons to study their properties and behavior.

In circular particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider, particles get a kick of energy each time they complete a rotation. Decelerators work in reverse; instead of an energy boost, particles get a kick backward to slow their speeds.

Neutrinos might be their own antiparticles -

A matter particle and its antimatter partner carry opposite charges, making them easy to distinguish. Neutrinos, nearly massless particles that rarely interact with matter, have no charge. Scientists believe that they may be Majorana particles, a hypothetical class of particles that are their own antiparticles.
Projects such as the Majorana Demonstrator and EXO-200 are aimed at determining whether neutrinos are Majorana particles by looking for a behavior called neutrinoless double-beta decay.
Some radioactive nuclei simultaneously decay, releasing two electrons and two neutrinos. If neutrinos were their own antiparticles, they would annihilate each other in the aftermath of the double decay, and scientists would observe only electrons.
Finding Majorana neutrinos could help explain why antimatter-matter asymmetry exists. Physicists hypothesize that Majorana neutrinos can either be heavy or light. The light ones exist today, and the heavy ones would have only existed right after the big bang. These heavy Majorana neutrinos would have decayed asymmetrically, leading to the tiny matter excess that allowed our universe to exist.

To know more about antimatter - Click This!