• Question: Is there any use for the antimatter being made at CERN? (Other than positron emission tomography)

    Asked by freddie to Suzie, Geoff, Adam, Rob, Sheila on 23 Mar 2011 in Categories: . This question was also asked by michaelwhu.
    • Photo: Suzie Sheehy

      Suzie Sheehy answered on 13 Mar 2011:

      The main point in making antimatter at CERN is to study it.

      I’m glad you already know about PET, you’ve obviously done your reading!
      One of the strange things in the Universe is, (rather bizzarely) that it exists at all! All of our theories say that there should be equal amounts of antimatter and matter in the universe, but at some point there must have been more matter than antimatter so that we’ve ended up with our (matter dominated) universe. Otherwise it would all have annihilated with the antimatter and we’d be left with a lot of radiation and nothing else!
      So at some level, antimatter and matter aren’t perfect opposites… and the only way to find out what is going on is to make antimatter and study it in the lab.

    • Photo: Sheila Kanani

      Sheila Kanani answered on 23 Mar 2011:

      Maybe we could use it for matter-antimatter anihilation and use the energy that comes from that as an alternative energy source? 😀

    • Photo: Adam Tuff

      Adam Tuff answered on 23 Mar 2011:

      I don’t think there is any sort of “practical” use for it yet bar the reason you’ve said. I know they’re interested in producing things like anti-hydrogen and anti-helium to study quark properties and properties of interacting anti-matter, as well as the differences these anti-nuclei have with their matter counterparts. Apart from that, I don’t think there is any use!

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