On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 4:47 PM, ndungu stephen
<ndungustephen@gmail.com> wrote:
Lets wait for the Large Hadron Collider to accelerate those particles to near speed of light collide them - analyze the results - then they can tell us whether anti-matter, dark matter and other particles we need to theorize exists or not.
@Stephen,
Antimatter exists. It is in things like bananas which have potassium in them, and a very small amount of potassium is radioactive. That particular radioactive decay produces an antimatter version of an electron, a positron. So every 75 minutes or so, a banana emits a positron. Of course, almost instantly it hits a regular electron and they annihilate, producing two photons! More info here [
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2009/07/23/antimatter-from-bananas/ ]
I happen to know a guy who worked on an experiment involving dark matter at Stanford for his post doc work in 2008. He says that they were looking at something called the Baryon number violation (BNV). This is new Physics beyond the Standard model and simply says that protons if given enough time decay into lighter particles. This is a condition that explains the matter / antimatter asymmetry (imbalance) in the known Universe although the cause for BNV has never been observed.
They have a detector deep underground in an old mine and they are looking for dark matter that interacts with their detector. These are very difficult experiments because standard radiation can mimic the dark matter interactions. The experiment itself is called CoGENT, you can Google it further. It might also be important to note that its dark matter that keeps Universe from violently tearing apart. It also account for *A LOT* of unobservable mass in the Universe that cannot be measure from the stars and galaxies.
Lastly there is a thirty year plan to build an international linear collider project after the LHC that will be used to study the super symmetric particles. The idea is to collide electrons and positrons at very high energies (1 TeV). The financial costs involved are astronomical, find more details here [
http://www.linearcollider.org/ ]. CERN's in-house project [
http://clic-study.org/ ]
Martin.
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