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Why do matter and antimatter annihilate? (bigthink.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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From forming bound states to normal scattering, many possibilities abound for matter-antimatter interactions. So why do they annihilate? There’s a quantum reason we simply can’t avoid.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Are there other theoretical interactions or consequences of interest if neutrinos turn out to be their own antiparticle? That idea is blowing my mind.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

There absolutely are, but I’m not super familiar with all of the consequences of majorana neutrinos. /u/[email protected] might be able to provide a better answer. My background is experimental nuclear physics, so I’m familiar a lot of experiments searching for beyond the standard model physics, but less so with the theory motivation.

One consequence of neutrinos being their own antiparticles is that it breaks lepton number conservation. This also breaks chiral symmetry, since all neutrinos are right-handed and anti-neutrinos are left-handed. This observation would also imply that neutrinos have mass - which is assumed but would be a really big deal to prove.