Do matter and antimatter eliminate each other or release their equivalent energies? I'm almost certain it's the latter as mass can't be destroyed, but when speaking of the big bang it's said if there were equal amounts of both matter and antimatter there would be nothing left. I wonder how that can be true if they don't destroy each other. It may have something to do with how energy decays into matter.
[Physics] Do matter and antimatter annihilate or release energy
antimatterenergy-conservationparticle-physics
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Dear Chad, you misinterpret the statement that "the known sources of CP-violation are not enough to explain the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the Universe."
You seem to think that the statement means that the known CP-violating parameter (namely the CP-violating phase in the CKM matrix) and the processes based on it are qualitatively insufficient to produce matter-antimatter asymmetry. But they are just quantitatively insufficient. One simply doesn't get enough of the asymmetry - but qualitatively, the CKM phase would be enough.
However, there are additional conditions beyond the CP-violation that have (or had) to be satisfied for the Universe to produce matter-antimatter asymmetry. They're known as the Sakharov conditions:
- CP-violation as well as C-violation
- Violation of the conservation of the baryon number B (and/or lepton number L)
- Evolution away from the thermal equilibrium.
All of these "violations" have be present simultaneously to produce quarks and antiquarks asymmetrically. If one of them is absent, the processes remain matter-antimatter symmetric.
As you can see, lab experiments may deviate from thermal equilibrium but all lab experiments we can perform conserve the baryon number $B$ (as well as the lepton number $L$). That's why we can't imitate the matter-antimatter asymmetry in the lab.
The attempted "lab experiments" violating $B$ are the proton decay experiments - those big reservoirs of pure water with sensitive detectors able to see every single proton decay. So far, none of them has been seen (even though the simplest grand unified theories predicted that the proton decay should have been observed rather quickly). For theoretical reasons, it still seems extremely likely that the proton is unstable (although its lifetime is longer than expected in the SU(5) GUT) and $B$ is not conserved. Consequently, $L$ is not conserved, either.
In particular, black holes radiate the Hawking radiation away and the composition of the Hawking radiation carries $B=0$ in average because the event horizon looks the same regardless of the value of $B$ of the initial star that has collapsed into the black hole. This paragraph was meant to be a proof that locality implies that $B$ has to be violated in quantum gravity (or earlier, e.g. in the GUT theory) as long as there are no gauge fields associated with $B$.
However, the combination $B-L$ may be in principle conserved - it may be a generator of a grand unified group. However, this symmetry is probably broken because there are no long-range forces acting on this combined charge. So all these charges unrelated to gauge symmetries have to be violated (non-conserved) at some level; this reflects the wisdom that quantum gravity doesn't allow any global symmetries. Any symmetry is either explicitly broken by some effects or it is a gauge symmetry.
Best Answer
They typically annihilate and release energy. Check out electron-positron annihilation, and low-energy proton-antiproton annihilation.
Image credit CSIRO, see The Big Bang & the Standard Model of the Universe
Energy can't be destroyed, mass is destroyed in annihilation.
There is another way to destroy particles, you can "melt" them. See this RHIC article. It talks about a quark-gluon soup, but IMHO it's best to think in terms of pea soup. There aren't any actual peas in pea soup. The peas got destroyed. If you can destroy some particles without using pair annihilation, you aren't limited to having equal numbers of electrons and positrons and protons and antiprotons. You can get into what's called a "stability tip". Think in terms of game play, where a small initial advantage is magnified, and one side wins.
Note that while people talk about baryon asymmetry, there's also a matching lepton asymmetry. And don't forget that you can't have a stable universe if one side doesn't win. I think it's a bit like a game of mixed doubles in tennis myself, and that the words matter and antimatter are a bit of a convention rather than being something that's justified by particle properties.