Sometime ago a member named TWScott mentioned that nuclear reactions and antimatter recations were essentially the same just on a larger scale. It was the first time I encountered that reasoning but it would not be the last. Recently several individuals have asserted that the word atomic can include antimatter reactions. My thinking was that anti matter was reaction which destroyed the atom completely breaking it down to it's constituent members while nuclear or atomic reactions merely break or force the bonds of energy which govern the center of an atom and it has no relation to antimatter annhialation. I've received stiff opposition to the contrary. Can anyone provide the propper understanding in physics today?
I think names like nuclear bomb or atomic energy are not based on strict logical or scientific principles. For example when energy is harnessed from nuclear reactions, calling it nuclear energy makes more sense than atomic energy. Since almost everything is made of atoms all kinds of energy would be atomic energy. Again everything involving protons or neutrons can be called also nuclear, so if you use proton-antiproton pair for your antimatter reactions it can be called nuclear. Basically what characterizes chemical reaction is that it changes one compound substance to another, what characterizes nuclear reaction is that it changes one element to another, but antimatter reaction changes elementary particles so personally I would be against calling antimatter reaction atomic or nuclear. Anyway there is already the word "annihilation" so why should make things unnecessarily complicated? The main thing is not the terminology but just to know what you are talking and what others are talking about.
Is there a propper term for the study of elementary particles? What I mean is when a supercolider is used to study the after math of annhialation is there name for this?
well I don't know if I could tell you what other people think, but what I think (if it matters) is that anti-matter reactions and our common thinking on atomic reactions are different in how they produce energy. Atomic reactions produce energy buy destroying the atomic bonds in nuclei (usually of Uranium-235, I think, in our powerplants) and harvesting the energy that results from it. Anti matter reactions create (massive) amounts of energy because they completely annihilate matter. 100% conversion of mass to energy. Mass is tons of energy in a different form. When we can get it back to energy, just a tiny amount of any kind of matter (even things we deem useless, like, say, a rock) would give us incredible amounts of energy. Take that rock, and convert it into pure energy, and we'd probably be able to supply the world with energy for months, or years!
A typical matter-antimatter event would be an electron colliding with a positron. That process results in the complete annihilation of the electron and positron and the release of all of their rest-mass energy (+ any kinetic energy they had before the collision) as two photons.
