Welcome back, Spherical Cow Moonions!
This week we are discussing the topic of antimatter! What is antimatter? How was antimatter first discovered? Why is there such an imbalance between matter and antimatter in the universe? Listen to this episode to find out more!
Please see some amendments/additions to our discussion:
Around 10:50 - I misspoke here! The weak force only governs beta decay. Alpha decay is essentially caused by a quantum mechanical phenomena called quantum tunneling!
Around 25:06 - To add to what I mentioned here about kaons, kaons are a type of composite particle known as mesons. Mesons are composed of equal numbers of quarks and antiquarks, commonly one quark and one antiquark. In the case of kaons there are four different possibilities:
- one strange quark and one up antiquark (a negatively charged kaon)
- one strange antiquark and one up quark (a positively charged kaon and the antiparticle of the negatively charged kaon)
- one strange antiquark and one down quark (a neutral kaon)
- one strange quark and one down antiquark (a neutral antikaon)
Around 28:30 - I got a little muddled with the names here! The six quarks are actually called 'up', 'down', 'charm', 'strange', 'top' and 'bottom'. 'Beauty' is just another name for the bottom quark. The top quark is also known as the truth quark.
To view our sources please see our website - https://www.podpage.com/spherical-cow/
N.B. Parts of this episode were recorded virtually so the audio quality might be different to normal.
