Antihyper Hydrogen-4

Why in the News?

• Antihyper Hydrogen-4 is made up of an antiproton, two antineutrons and one antihyperon (a baryon that contains a strange quark).
• Physicists found traces of this antimatter among particle tracks from 6 billion collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York.

Key findings:

• Both hyperhydrogen-4 and its antimatter counterpart antihyper hydrogen-4 seem to wink out of existence very quickly.
• The physicists didn’t find a significant difference between their lifetimes.
• The scientists’ next step will be to compare the masses of the antiparticles and their particle opposites, which they hope could reveal some clues as to how our matter-heavy universe came to be.
• Antimatter: Except for having opposite electric charges, antimatter has the same properties as matter, same mass, same lifetime before decaying and same interactions.

What is Antiparticle?

• It is a subatomic particle that has the same mass as another particle and equal but opposite values of some other properties. Example- The antiparticle of the electron is the positron.

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