This was confirmed in 1930 by Carl Anderson, who, while observing particle trails in a cloud chamber, found the positron.

The concept of antimatter was first predicted by theoretical physicist Paul Dirac in 1928, who posited in papers the possible existence of a particle with the same mass as an electron but with the opposite, positive charge. They are planning to perform gravity measurements with more exotic matter, such as positronium and antihydrogen, and use those results to eventually probe the nature of gravity at very small scales. The researchers are hopeful that the results of their study will open the door to new kinds of interferometry experiments. Paola Scampoli, a physicist at the Politecnico di Milano and co-author of the paper, said that the results of their study prove the positron’s quantum-mechanical origin, thus explaining the antiparticle’s wave nature. According to the researchers, the positrons that survived the trip hit a detector – a 50-micrometer-thick gelatin full of silver bromide crystals, which served as a three-dimensional photographic film – where they formed an interference pattern normally expected from waves and not individual particles. The same thing happened in the antimatter version of the experiment.ĭuring the experiment, the team, led by Simone Sala of the University of Milan, fired a focused beam at a rate of approximately 5,000 positrons per second through two gold-coated silicon nitride gratings, each with a different distance between the slits. But instead, they acted like waves and diffracted, thereby forming a spread-out pattern of alternating bright and dim lines. According to the experiment’s abstract, if the electrons had been only particles, they would have formed a pattern of two bright lines on the detector.

In the 1927 experiment, scientists Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer fired a stream of electrons through a sheet with two slits on it, with a detector on the other side.

In a study published in the journal Scientific Advances, a team of physicists from Italian and Swiss institutions, said they made the discovery after subjecting positrons, or positively charged antimatter particles, with the exact same mass as negatively charged electrons, to a version of the historic double-slit or the Young-Feynman experiment.Ĭonducted in 1927, the double-slit experiment showed that electrons are both particles and waves.

Antimatter – defined by modern physics as sub-atomic particles that have properties opposite normal sub-atomic particles – has recently been confirmed as both a particle and a wave.

Paul dirac live proof of antimatter