News tagged with antiprotons

The antiproton (p, pronounced p-bar), which is also sometimes referred to as a negatron, is the antiparticle of the proton. Antiprotons are stable, but they are typically short-lived since any collision with a proton will cause both particles to be annihilated in a burst of energy.

The existence of the antiproton with −1 electric charge, opposite to the +1 electric charge of the proton, was predicted by Paul Dirac in his 1933 Nobel Prize lecture [1]. Dirac received the Nobel Prize for his previous 1928 publication of his Dirac Equation that predicted the existence of positive and negatve solutions to the Energy Equation (E = mc2) of Einstein and the existence of the positron, the antimatter analog to the electron, with positive charge and opposite spin.

The antiproton was experimentally confirmed in 1955 by University of California, Berkeley physicists Emilio Segrè and Owen Chamberlain, for which they were awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physics. An antiproton consists of two up antiquark and one down antiquark (uud). The properties of the antiproton that have been measured all match the corresponding properties of the proton, with the exception that the antiproton has opposite electric charge and magnetic moment than the proton. The question of how matter is different from antimatter remains an open problem, in order to explain how our universe survived the Big Bang and why so little remains of antimatter today in our solar system.[citation needed]