Question: What are the effects of matter and antimatter of the same type colliding what happens and is there any different effects for different types of anti and normal matter

April Cridland answered on 29 Sep 2020:

When matter and antimatter collide, they annihilate. This means that they turn all of their mass and any energy they possessed into smaller particles and photons. Photons are packets of light. Exactly which particles are produced depends on the original matter and antimatter particles.

An example, if an electron meets its antiparticle (a positron), then they will probably produce two photons which travel in opposite directions to each other. This is because they only have a small mass, electrons cannot be broken into any smaller particles and I’m assuming that they do not have very much energy.

However, if a proton met an antiproton, there are a few different options that could happen. Protons can be broken down into quarks, but quarks don’t like to hang around on their own, so they meet up with other quarks to form new particles like pions and kaons. Sometimes these new particles will be unstable and decay to a range of electrons, positrons, photons and neutrinos. So the bigger the particles the more options there are for different combinations. This applies even when the particle and antiparticle are not the exact opposites of each other.