Transcript

Antimatter Explained - Ep. 1

From CERN · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 15 min · 1,990 words · 17 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Antimatter Explained - Ep. 1", an episode of CERN published December 1, 2025 (15 min, about 1,990 words). It mentions 12 people, works and ideas, including CERN, Paul Dirac, anti-hydrogen, anti-proton, Carl Anderson.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 3:00: anti-proton, Carl Anderson, anti-electron, anti-roton
  2. – 6:00: anti-electron, anti-hydrogen, anti-proton, neutrino
  3. – 9:00: anti-electron, anti-roton, neutrino, anti-utrino
  4. – 12:00: CERN antimatter factory, anti-electron, anti-roton
  5. – 14:57: anti-hydrogen, anti-proton

Notable quotes from "Antimatter Explained - Ep. 1"

  • The draq equation describes the movement of an electron at any speed, even approaching the speed of light. But the equation has a surprising property that nobody was really expecting. The.
    about Paul Dirac · at
  • But then four years later in 1932, Carl Anderson discovered the posetron. And physicists quickly realized that this was the missing other solution to the rack's equation. A…
    about Carl Anderson · at
  • And this was done for the first time in 1995 right here at CERN in the low energy anti-proton ring facility or lear for short where over the period of 3 weeks nine atoms of antihydrogen were produced. Now in a similar way you can.
    about CERN · at
  • Even if it's not moving, it still has energy because it has mass. So the energy of the electron is the mass of the electron times the speed of light times the speed of light. Now, nature would be happy to go to a state with.
    about neutrino · at
  • So the total charge of this pair is now zero. And the process where the two transform into photons is actually allowed. It has to be two or more photons due to other conservation laws. But in general, nature will take.
    about anti-electron · at
  • Moving very fast, there's also their kinetic energy available. With more energy, heavier particles can be created such as a muon anti-uon pair or a Z bzon or something else.
    about muon · at
  • Incredibly complicated and uses tremendous amounts of energy. In fact, to produce antimatter, you need billions of times more energy than what would be released if that…
    about anti-proton · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Paul Dirac — Person · Referenced expert · 4 mentions
    Cited as the physicist who formulated the Dirac equation (1928), motivating the discussion of antimatter via the equation’s second solution.
  • Carl Anderson — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as the experimental physicist who discovered the positron in 1932, presented as the physical realization of the Dirac equation’s second solution.
  • Albert Einstein — Person · Referenced expert · 1 mention · first at
    Referenced for special relativity, which is combined with quantum mechanics in the narrative leading to the Dirac equation and the prediction of antimatter.
    When Paul Drack united the Shreddinger equation which describes the evolution of quantum wave functions with Einstein's theory of special relativity.

Companies & orgs

  • CERN — Company · Business focus · 3 mentions
    Primary research organization mentioned for its work in antimatter production and study.

Products & tech

  • anti-hydrogen — Product · Case study · 3 mentions · first at
    Primary example of antimatter atoms produced at CERN.
    Yes they can. If you take an anti-electron and an anti-proton, you can form a bound state anti-hydrogen.
  • anti-proton — Product · Case study · 3 mentions · first at
    Key component in the production of antimatter atoms like anti-hydrogen.
  • anti-electron — Product · Case study · 5 mentions · first at
    First discovered antiparticle, key in discussions of antimatter.
  • anti-roton — Product · Case study · 3 mentions · first at
    Antiparticle of the proton, discussed in the context of antimatter.
    After that, 22 years had to pass before another antiparticle was found. The anti-roton, a particle identical to the proton, but negatively charged. Today, we know that every particle of matter has its corresponding antiparticle,.
  • neutrino — Product · Case study · 2 mentions · first at
    Particle with no electrical charge, mentioned in the context of antimatter.
  • anti-utrino — Product · Case study · 2 mentions · first at
    Antiparticle of the neutrino, discussed in the context of antimatter.
    Photons with a very small chance entirely at random, a nutrino anti-utrino pair can be produced instead.
  • muon — Product · Case study · 1 mention · first at
    Particle mentioned in the context of annihilation processes.

Places & events

  • CERN antimatter factory — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at
    Primary location where antimatter research and production occurs.
    Maybe here. This is the CERN antimatter factory, home to several experiments studying the properties of antimatter.

Full transcript with timestamps

It all started in the year 1928 when Paul Drack united the Shreddinger equation which describes the evolution of quantum wave functions with Einstein's theory of special relativity. The draq equation describes the movement of an electron at any speed, even approaching the speed of light. But the equation has a surprising property that nobody was really expecting. The electron is just one of two possible solutions. Now, how is that possible? Well, it's actually pretty common in mathematics. It happens, for example, in what we call the quadratic equation x * x equals let's say 4 or in other words x^ squar which is why we call it the quadratic equation equals four right this is the same thing so what number multiplied by itself gives four well of course two hold on but that's not the only possibility right minus two is just as good so in fact this equation has two possible solutions now if If we write

down the the the raq equation, this has two solutions. One of them is our old friends, the electron, but it has a second solution, which is kind of like an electron with negative energy. What could that be? The physical interpretation of this second solution was unclear at first, but then four years later in 1932, Carl Anderson discovered the posetron. And physicists quickly realized that this was the missing other solution to the rack's equation. A particle pretty much identical to the electron, but with positive instead of negative electrical charge. The anti-electron.

After that, 22 years had to pass before another antiparticle was found. The anti-roton, a particle identical to the proton, but negatively charged. Today, we know that every particle of matter has its corresponding antiparticle, which is like its twin copy, but with opposite electrical charge. But what about particles with zero charge? Then, for example, what about the neutron? Well, the neutron also has an antimatter counterpart. the anti-utron. That's because the neutron, like the proton, is made of three quarks. And the anti-utron, like the anti-proton, is made of three anti-quarks.

Protons and neutrons are composite particles. But if you look at the elementary particles of matter that we know today, quarks and lepttons, they all have antiparticles. There's quarks and there's anti-quarks. Leptons and antileptons. We already talked about the anti-electron depositron, but also nutrinos that have no electrical charge have antiarticles. For every nutrino, there's an anti-utrino, and the two are not the same particle. But it is actually possible for particles to be their own antiarticles. The photon is an example of this. This doesn't happen for elementary quarks and lepttons, but it can happen for composite particles. Example the Jeson a state containing one charm quark and one charm anti-quark. So the antiarticle of this would be one charm anti-quark and one charm quark. So the exact same thing. So the anti-jypsai is the jpai.

Okay that's particles and antiparticles. So now the question is what about more complex systems? Can antiparticles form antimatter? Yes they can. If you take an anti-electron and an anti-proton, you can form a bound state anti-hydrogen. And this was done for the first time in 1995 right here at CERN in the low energy anti-proton ring facility or lear for short where over the period of 3 weeks nine atoms of antihydrogen were produced. Now in a similar way you can take anti-protons, anti-elerons and anti-neutrons to make any chemical element out of antimatter. In fact any form of matter. So stars, planets, galaxies for all we know even life itself could be made out of antimatter and it would look just the same as the stuff made out of matter. So maybe we have antimatter here on Earth. Well, we know we don't and we know it's not possible. Why? That's because when matter and antimatter come into contact

with each other, they annihilate. So, let's talk about this for now. Chances are that one of the first things that comes to your mind when you hear the word antimatter is annihilation. Matter and antimatter annihilate when they touch, disappearing in the process and releasing insane amounts of energy. So, let's talk about the physics of this process. What can annihilate with what? And in what situation? What exactly happens? And what kind of energy is released? And can we maybe use this for something? Okay, so what is annihilation really? Why do matter and antimatter annihilate in the first place? Well, this goes back all the way to one of the most fundamental laws of physics that says that nature always prefers states with less potential energy. And if it finds a way to go from a state with higher energy to one with lower energy, it'll do that. For example, let's look at the electron.

Even if it's not moving, it still has energy because it has mass. So the energy of the electron is the mass of the electron times the speed of light times the speed of light. Now, nature would be happy to go to a state with less mass like the nutrino or the photon. But it cannot because the law of conservation of electrical charge forbids that electrical charge cannot change in a in an interaction and here it would have to because the electron has charge and the nutrino and the photon don't. There is no other charged particle lighter than the electron. So the electron cannot by itself decay or transform into another particle. And as far as we can tell, the electron is stable unless it interacts with something. An electron is going to forever remain an electron. So now let's imagine we have two particles, an electron and a posetron, which is how we call an anti-electron.

So the total charge of this pair is now zero. And the process where the two transform into photons is actually allowed. It has to be two or more photons due to other conservation laws. But in general, nature will take the opportunity to go from two electron masses to zero mass anytime it can. And we call this process electron posetron annihilation. In this process, all of the energy of the electron and positron masses is converted into the energies of the photons with a very small chance entirely at random, a nutrino anti-utrino pair can be produced instead.

And if the electron and the posetron are moving very fast, there's also their kinetic energy available. With more energy, heavier particles can be created such as a muon anti-uon pair or a Z bzon or something else. This is how electron positron colliders work transforming the kinetic energy of the electron and the posetron into new particles. What's also interesting is that in some cases an electron as and a posetron instead of annihilating can form a bound state called posetronium in which the two particles are essentially orbiting each other depending on how their spins are oriented. This system has a lifetime of about 1/10enth of a nancond or a bit more than 100 nconds and nancond being 1 billionth of a second. And only after that time the pair will annihilate producing several photons.

Okay, so that's the electron. What about the proton? Well, a proton can annihilate with an anti-roton. The process is actually quite complicated as all the quarks and anti-quarks interact at the end. Several light particles made of quark anti-quark pairs that we call pons are usually produced. In a similar way, a neutron can annihilate with an anti-utton. But can a proton annihilate with an anti- neutron? Yes, it can. Since this is again going to be quarks and anti-quarks interacting, just that as opposed to proton anti-roton or neutron anti-neutron annihilation, this time the charges of the pions produced will add up to one, not zero, to match the total charge of the proton anti-utton pair.

So then can any matter particle annihilate with any antimatter particle? Can a proton annihilate with an anti-electron? Well no. These are fundamentally different types of particles. And there are several conservation laws that forbid such a process. So basically if you just mix protons and posetrons, nothing would really happen. But of course, matter in general contains all of these protons, neutrons, and electrons. So if you somehow got hold of a gram of antimatter and mixed that with a gram of matter, all the protons, electrons anti-electrons anti-rotons all of the others would indeed annihilate in a very energetic flash of photons, pions, muons, and other particles. And the amount of energy released in this process would be enough to take an engineer from CERN on a mission to the International Space Station about 30 or 40 times.

In the annihilation process, nearly 100% of mass is converted into energy. I'm saying nearly 100 because some of the particles produced are actually massive. So, a small amount of leftover mass still remains. But this is still almost a hundred times more efficient than nuclear fusion. So could this be the ideal energy source? Well, we'd first have to figure out a way to make the products of annihilation mostly high energy gamma radiation to make them do something useful. But also, where do we find a gram of antimatter?

Maybe here. This is the CERN antimatter factory, home to several experiments studying the properties of antimatter. We'll talk about these experiments and their studies in a later episode, but for now, let's just focus on the factory vet producing antimatter.

So, producing antimatter is actually incredibly complicated and uses tremendous amounts of energy. In fact, to produce antimatter, you need billions of times more energy than what would be released if that antimatter were to annihilate. And then if you produce it, you have to store it somehow, trapped, suspended in vacuum away from all the ordinary matter around it. Because if it touches ordinary matter, it would of course annihilate. The current record for holding trapped antimatter is 614 days achieved right here in the base experiment for a few single anti-rotons held in a trap. But for holding large quantities of antimatter using a plasma of charged anti-proton is not very practical. So we could try with anti-atom.

Now the only anti-atto that we know how to produce is antihydrogen. We produce antihydrogen in a few places around the antimatter factory. So in terms of storing antihydrogen, the current leader is the alpha experiment right here which can produce antihydrogen and then store it for up to about 100 hours. But how much anti-hydrogen can we realistically produce? Experiments in the antimatter factory get up to 10 million anti-protons every 2 minutes and catch about 1/10enth of that. About 30 million anti-protons per hour. Alpha then converts them to antihydrogen but can only capture about 3,000 atoms per hour.

How many atoms are there in 1 g of antihydrogen? About 6 * 10 23rd. That's 6 and 23 zeros. So the time needed to accumulate a gram of antihydrogen at these speeds would be billions of billions of years. Even if we converted all the anti-protons to antihydrogen and caught all the anti-hydrogen, which is completely unrealistic, we'd still need hundreds of billions of years, much, much more than the age of the universe. So, unless we discover some new physics phenomena, we're not going to be able to fabricate any macroscopic quantities of antimatter.

But what if we look for it in space instead? mine it on antillets, bring it back home as an energy source. Well, strangely enough, it seems that there are no antillets in the universe. In fact, the universe appears to contain almost no antimatter whatsoever. Understanding why this is the case is one of the biggest puzzles in physics today. Why this is a puzzle and how we are trying to solve it coming up in episode 2.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Antimatter Explained - Ep. 1"?

In order: 0:00 anti-proton, Carl Anderson, anti-electron, anti-roton; 3:00 anti-electron, anti-hydrogen, anti-proton, neutrino; 6:00 anti-electron, anti-roton, neutrino, anti-utrino; 9:00 CERN antimatter factory, anti-electron, anti-roton; 12:00 anti-hydrogen, anti-proton.

What is mentioned in this CERN episode?

12 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including CERN, Paul Dirac, anti-hydrogen, anti-proton, Carl Anderson, CERN antimatter factory. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Antimatter Explained - Ep. 1"?

The episode runs 15 min; the transcript is about 1,990 words in 17 timestamped sections.

More from CERN

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 23, 2026.