Cosmology with antimatter

Hannes Alfvén proposes that the origin of the universe was a tenuous “ambiplasma” composed of matter and antimatter. He treats this new cosmology at some length in a recent issue of Reviews of Modern Physics [37. 652 (1965)]. The ambiplasma (Professor Allvén’s word) would have been a gas of protons, electrons, antiprotons, and positrons subject to selfgravitation and electrical and magnetic forces. If the composition of the ambiplasma were symmetric, these forces would separate the ambiplasma into three kinds of regions: one exclusively matter, one exclusively antimatter, and a buffer region of ambiplasma serving to keep the two others apart. Professor Alfvén argues that regions of the same content would attract each other but repel those of opposite content, and therefore larger and larger regions of matter and antimatter would coalesce.

This article is only available in PDF format