23 upvotes, 4 direct replies (showing 4)
View submission: What causes the mutual annihilation of matter-antimatter reactions?
I'm still confused about why annihilation happens. Is it just that opposite charges want to equalize to zero?
Comment by somneuronaut at 21/11/2024 at 23:24 UTC
20 upvotes, 2 direct replies
It's not just electric charge but also the other 'charges' represented by quantum numbers (like spin or lepton number). Matter and antimatter have opposite quantum numbers and so if you were to 'put them in the same place' you would have created a spatial region with energy but totals of 0s for quantum numbers. That's annihilation and results in particles like photons.
Comment by [deleted] at 21/11/2024 at 23:23 UTC
10 upvotes, 0 direct replies
[removed]
Comment by agaminon22 at 21/11/2024 at 23:08 UTC
15 upvotes, 1 direct replies
It's really not different from other kinds of particle decays or interaction/collision processes. There are many other possibilities that are not just annihilating into photons. An electron and a positron can even turn into a muon and an antimuon, if the energy is high enough.
Essentially, all processes that are possible will happen, at some point.
Comment by kogai at 21/11/2024 at 23:52 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
In quantum physics, everything behaves like a wave.
Two waves can pass through each other and they add up when they overlap.
If you pass a wave and its negation through each other, when you add them up you get... zero.
This is simplified as particles act like waves in abstract spaces rather than 3 dimensions (but also in 3 dimensional space too). They also don't have to be zero in every dimension they previously occupied.