Fact sheet of Phys21

— Details that are important in search for new physics —

Before I present my ideas about how to step forward, it is important to expose some facts that are little or not at all known for public. Decades of research efforts that refined aspects of modern physics yield sometimes surprises and although some of theese results are integrated in the main structure of the theories, they continue to remain known only to people who had the chance to do advanced studies. Let’s start an inventory of some little known details that will be important in the following. The list is meant to grow from time to time. A legend at the end helps to identify the meaning of categories.

[EP-01] When I talk about my research, the first question I encounter is: what is antimatter? The not so well known answer is, until today, antimatter is what we can compose with elementary anti-particles, because we think matter is composed exclusively by elementary matter building blocks. Experimental physics succeeded to produce till date anti-deuteron and anti-hidrogen, by combining the elementary anti-electrons with composite anti-protons and anti-neutron. Many exotic particles turned out to be anti-matter counterpart of an other one. An antiparticle can be recognised as such if it has the same mass, but opposite charge of its matter counterpart. It is worth to emphasise that not only the electric charge is opposite, but charges of all basic interactions (electric charge, colour charge, weak charges) and all other additive quantum numbers too (lepton flavour, baryon number, etc.). It is also of crucial importance to note that an antiparticle has positive mass, but represents in the Dirac theory a negative energy!
For further reading on the subject, see for example: CERN Courrier articles, but I can equally recommend other Internet sites given by popular search motors.

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LEGEND:
[EP..]= Elementary particle physics
[QM..]= Quantum mechanics
[CO..]= Cosmology
[GR..]= Gravitation and Relativity theory
[PL..]= Planck-scale physics