WHEN SPACE IS THROWN UPWARDS ANTIGRAVITY

It’s the force that throws objects up, and if found it could be the holy grail for space travel among the stars

Straddling the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva lies the European Organization for Nuclear Research, more popularly known as CERN.

This laboratory houses the accelerators, detectors and equipment comprising a number of different particle physics experiments, including the famed Large Hadron Collider (LHC) responsible for discovering a particle suspected to be the Higgs boson, the so-called ‘God particle’, in 2012.

CERN’s particle accelerators are designed to study the tiniest constituents of matter: the fundamental particles that form everything from stars and planets to your afternoon cup of tea.

This type of matter is known to scientists as ‘baryonic matter’. The vast majority of what we see throughout the visible cosmos is formed of baryonic matter, comprising particles including protons, neutrons, and electrons – the latter are not technically baryons, but are usually considered baryonic matter by most astronomers.

However, this is not the only particle world to exist. Every ‘ordinary’ particle we know of is accompanied by an antiparticle – a mirror image that has the same mass as its ordinary counterpart but opposing properties – charge, spin, quantum numbers, magnetic moment. The electron, for example, has a charge of -1 and is partnered by the positron, which has a charge of +1. The proton partners the negatively charged antiproton, the neutron the antineutron and so on.