Antimatter, (Where has it gone?)

[Cyberia]

They are created and destroyed with the release of lots of energy. If this happened to any extent, they would blow apart the surrounding matter from violent anti-matter and matter annihilation.

 

It is a rarity because it takes a lot of energy to create them, which is not casually present anywhere.

[CraigD]

... Each nanosecond antimatter meson DO exist (e.g., they are real particles with mass). There are millions of meson exchange events each nanosecond moment for the strong force, never ending, one nanosecond moment after another. So, do the calculation. Add the mass of all the antimatter mesons involved in all possible force interactions for all stable hydrogen and helium isotopes in the universe, do this, nanosecond by nanosecond moment. The result of the calculation will equal the so-called "missing mass" of the universe.

Do you have a source for this claim, Rade? It contradicts what I’ve read at Wikipedia article strong interaction and the Smoot group webpage the Strong Nuclear Force, and every other source I can recall.

 

The strong interaction both confines quarks within hadrons (composite baryons such as protons and neutrons, which contain 3 quarks, mesons which contain a quark and an antiquark, and maybe other short-lived exotic particles that have been predicted but not observed) and binds hadrons such as protons and neutrons together, such as in atomic nuclei. The first of these, know as the strong force, is carried by gluons, which interact with quarks and each other. The second, know as the residual strong force or the nuclear force, requires that the participating nucleons exchange quark/antiquark pairs in the form of mesons. However, these mesons aren’t new, previously unaccounted for mass-energy. They come from the participating nucleons.

 

Thus, while the quarks and gluons in nuclear force exchange mesons account for a fraction of the mass of an atom, that mass is “borrowed” from the nucleus’s protons and neutrons. I don’t know how to “do the calculation” of how much, but as the particles involved obey mass-energy conservation, know that it can’t exceed that of the particles of which a given atom can be formed, which need consist only of proton/electron pairs, and the energy needed to form them.

 

The missing mass problem finds that ordinary mater – hadrons and leptons – account for only 5% of mass apparent from large-scale effects of gravity. Because they take away mass from protons and neutrons, mesons add nothing to the mass of the universe, far less than the 20 time that of the mass of all protons and neutrons needed to support your claim, Rade.

 

That the missing mass can be accounted for by an overlooked, well-known interaction is enticing, Rade, but in this case of your claim for nuclear force exchange mesons, I can’t see any possibility it’s correct.

 

PS: It’s technically incorrect to call these exchanged mesons real particles. Rather, they’re usually virtual particles that exist too briefly over two small a volume of space to be observed directly.