So where did all the antimatter go? We simply don't know – this is one of the greatest mysteries of physics. But less than a second after the Big Bang, something happened that caused an asymmetry, leaving a small excess of matter behind. As this primordial energy soup cooled, particles and antiparticles formed in equal quantities. Physicists believe that the universe was created in the Big Bang billions of years ago, and in particular that it started out so hot and tiny that no particles could form at the very start. But it is incredibly inefficient: in a typical creation process at the CERN antiproton decelerator, about one million protons are collided with a metal target to yield a single antiproton. This is the process by which the first antiproton was created, and it is still what we use today. The opposite is also true: with sufficient energy, we can create matter, but like annihilation, this process is also symmetric, so matter and antimatter will always be created in equal quantities.
When a particle and its antiparticle are brought together, they annihilate each other – that is they collide and disappear – and all their mass energy is released in a burst of light. Mass is a compact holder of energy, but not all of it can normally be released – even a nuclear weapon only releases a tiny fraction of the energy of its mass. The accelerator worked by supplying enough energy to create antiprotons by converting energy to mass.
According to Einstein's famous equation E=mc² mass can be converted to energy and vice versa.
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