[Physics] What happens to a particle and antiparticle that collide

antimatterenergy-conservationmass-energyparticle-physics

Matter can never be destroyed, so what happens to those particles? Do they just disappear? Where does the mass go?

Best Answer

The following diagram and explanation from Cornell University's page A Brief Introduction to Particle Physics may be of help:

enter image description here

(Note, as correctly mentioned by @HDE in the comments, the term 'mini Big Bang' is a bit misleading, but the main point remains as @Jon Custer mentioned in the comments:

The mass gets converted into energy. And energy can be converted into mass

A bit more detail from the Cornell site:

In head-on collisions between high-energy particles and their antiparticles, pure energy is created in "little bangs" when the particles and their antiparticles annihilate each other and disappear. This energy is then free to reappear as pairs of fundamental particles, e.g., a quark-antiquark pair, or an electron-positron pair, etc.