antarpartikel

Antiparticle, known in Indonesian as antarpartikel, is a subatomic particle that has the same mass as a given particle but opposite electric charge and other quantum numbers. For every particle that has an antiparticle, the pair shares many properties but differs in the sign of charge and in quantities such as lepton or baryon number.

When a particle encounters its antiparticle, they can annihilate each other, converting their mass into energy, typically in the form of photons. Antiparticles can also be produced in high-energy processes, such as particle collisions or radiation in strong fields, where energy is sufficient to create a particle–antiparticle pair.

Examples include the positron, which is the antiparticle of the electron; antiproton and antineutron, which are the antiparticles of the proton and neutron; and antineutrinos, which are the antiparticles of neutrinos. Antiparticles share the same mass and spin as their counterparts but carry opposite charge and opposite values of certain quantum numbers.

Historically, the concept of antiparticles emerged from the Dirac equation in 1928, predicting entities with positive energy and opposite charge. The positron was experimentally discovered in 1932 by Carl Anderson, and subsequent research confirmed a wide range of antiparticle species.

Applications of antiparticles include medical imaging, notably positron-emission tomography (PET), which uses positrons to produce diagnostic images. Antiparticle research remains central to fundamental physics, probing symmetries and the behavior of matter under extreme conditions. In the macroscopic world, antimatter is extraordinarily scarce due to rapid annihilation with ordinary matter.