| The answer you gave is like the meme of how to draw an owl in two steps (1. draw a perfect circle, 2. draw the rest of the owl). A more helpful answer might be something like: -- Each particle has a corresponding field over all of space. The substance-like particles obey certain rules, called Fermi statistics, which leads to a model called the Dirac sea; this makes all of space analogous to semiconductors, with electrons and holes, except that because this is just an analogy the holes are actually antiparticles. The analogy is useful, in that it takes a certain minimum energy level to create a particle-antiparticle pair, just as it does an electron-hole pair. For fundamental particles like electrons-positrons, this is fine and works as expected; the only extra step is knowing what has to absorb the energy to create the pair… but it turns out that all normal matter will do. For composite particles like protons and neutrons, this is much harder, as the thing you make this way are quark-antiquark pairs, and to make either an antiproton or antineutron you need a specific combination of three specific "colours" (not real colours) of quark, and we have only extremely limited control in this regard. When you have both positrons and antiprotons, "cool" them from the absurdly high energy states necessary to create them and let them combine just like electrons and normal protons recombining after getting ionised. |