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View submission: What causes the mutual annihilation of matter-antimatter reactions?
There are different fundamental forces acting between particles of normal matter.
The gravitational force attracts matter to matter, it also attracts matter to antimatter. It gets stronger as things get closer together.
The strong force attracts things together at small scales, and is much greater than the gravitational force. But it and something called the Pauli exclusion principle prevent neutrons from falling into each other normally.
The electromagnetic force makes particles with opposite charge attract each other, and particles with similar charge repel each other. So protons repel protons, electronics repel electrons. But in antimatter charges are inverted, so a proton attracts an anti proton.
With normal matter, gravity and the strong force bring things together, then the electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force, and Pauli exclusion principle keeps them far enough apart that they don't try to occupy the same space at the same time. When matter and antimatter collide, the electromagnetic force doesn't counteract the strong force - it helps it along. So it's much more likely particles end up colliding with high energy.
This makes something that's usually hard to do with normal matter (forcing them to occupy the same space at the same time) much more likely. And when matter collides in this way, it gets destroyed and releases energy.
In standard fusion and fission reactions, only part of the matter (the binding energy) gets converted to energy. The number of neutrons and protons doesn't change, just how they're bonded to each other. In a matter-antimatter annihilation, a much higher proportion of the total mass can get converted to energy.
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