An international scientific race is picking up speed as researchers attempt to see our universe for what it really is and discover exactly how it came to be.
According to the Standard Model of physics, the origin of our universe was marked by explosive contact between subatomic particles of opposite charges. Today, scientists are focusing their most powerful technologies on a single, mind-bending question: How did matter as we know it survive, and what happened to its birth twin, the mysterious substance known as antimatter?
The Great Cosmic Mystery: Where Did the Antimatter Go?
When the universe was born, it was incredibly hot. After about a billionth of a second, it cooled enough for fundamental particles to emerge in pairs of opposite charges (quarks and antiquarks, followed by electrons and positrons). Almost immediately, these pairs began annihilating each other.
When the dust settled, only a tiny fraction of matter—about one particle in a billion—managed to survive this mass annihilation. That microscopic remnant went on to form everything we know today: light-emitting gas, dust, stars, galaxies, and planets.
In 1928, physicist Paul Dirac wrote equations predicting that every type of particle has an identical twin with an opposite charge. For every proton, there is an antiproton; for every electron, a positron. Yet, if matter and antimatter are perfectly symmetrical mirrors of each other, why do we live in a matter-dominated universe?
Hunting for Answers in Space: The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer
To find primordial antimatter that might have survived the Big Bang, scientists turned to space. During the 134th flight of the Space Shuttle Endeavour, astronauts delivered a massive piece of cargo to the International Space Station (ISS): the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS).
The brainchild of MIT's Samuel Ting, the AMS is not a traditional telescope. Instead of capturing photons (light), it captures exotic, electrically charged particles such as:
- Dark matter particles (like the theoretical neutralino)
- Strangelets (a completely new form of matter)
- High-energy cosmic rays hurled from supernovas
If the AMS detects heavy elements like anti-helium or anti-carbon, it would prove that massive concentrations of antimatter exist deep in space, potentially forming entire anti-stars and anti-galaxies.
Creating Antimatter on Earth: The CERN Experiments
While the AMS hunts in space, scientists on the ground are corralling antimatter in laboratories. Because antimatter violently annihilates upon touching regular matter, the challenge is creating it and safely trapping it for study.
The Alpha Chamber at CERN
At the giant European physics lab, CERN, scientists use powerful magnetic fields to isolate particles inside the Alpha chamber. By carefully forcing positrons and antiprotons into contact, they form anti-hydrogen. Recently, they managed to trap this volatile anti-molecule for roughly 1,000 seconds (almost 17 minutes). On the atomic scale—where life spans are measured in nanoseconds—this is an eternity.
The ASACUSA Detector
Within CERN, another group using the ASACUSA detector is searching for infinitesimal differences between matter and antimatter. By hitting oddball molecules with lasers, they calculate the exact weight of antiprotons.
"We have measured to a precision of nine digits," says Masaki Hori from the Max Plank Institute. "And we found that the antiproton mass is exactly the same as the proton mass to nine digits of precision."
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC)
If the masses are identical, the difference between matter and antimatter must lie deeper in their structural laws. At the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, scientists send atoms whipping through a 27-kilometer tunnel into ultra-high-energy collisions.
By observing the splatter of subatomic particles, physicists hope to find subtle discrepancies in how quarks and antiquarks behave. Understanding this "asymmetry" is one of the most critical quests in modern cosmology, holding the key to expanding—or rewriting—the Standard Model entirely.
As scientists look deeper into the origins of the cosmos, the clash of these opposite forms of matter harks back to William Blake's famous poem:
"What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?"