Would you mind defining what an annihilation is? What I read (which isn’t much, admittedly) sounded like it’s just a particle and antiparticle interacting in a way that makes them disappear and other particles appear, while conserving a momentum and charge of the whole overall interaction. How is it fundamentally different from, let’s say, two high-energy photons colliding and creating an electron-positron pair? I’m not saying it isn’t, I’m just curious why and how.

Huh, I never really thought about boson antiparticles, thanks for driving me to it. I did a little digging and I’m happy to report that what I wrote seems to be accurate, it isn’t known whether neutrinos are their own antiparticles or not. The term Majorana particle only applies to fermions, which I didn’t know. As for photon-photon annihilation, why do you think it can’t happen? Annihilation is when 2 particles collide and produce a bunch of other particles, often photons, but not necessarily. Does that not happen to photons? For possible neutrino-neutrino annihilation, my quick uninformed search suggested that possible neutrinoless double beta decay may be interpreted as annihilation of neutrinos. The wiki particle says it would require change of the neutrino to a right-handed one, which seems like a requirement for annihilation anyway? I don’t know, I really barely know anything about this stuff. But it seems that if neutrino is its own antiparticle, its annihilation with itself is not obviously out of the question. I had no idea we don’t know where they take their mass. That’s very, very interesting, thank you!

I live under the impression that we don’t conclusively know, although some headway was made. There is a chance that neutrinos are their own antiparticles. I think the right term to start a search on the topic is Majorana particles. This theory was featured in Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, BTW.

I apologise, I don’t have time for a more exhaustive explnation, I would have to study it again first. If you want, I can try to have a look at it later.

Surprisingly, I just read it actually does, and quite a few. None revolutionary and eye-catching like everybody hoped, but apparently, most of us has graphene in our smartphones, for example. I don’t remember specifics, I can try to look for the article where I read it, if you want very much.

I think a quasi-particle is more like a phenomenon that can mathematically be described in a way a particle would be, rather than just a group of particles. After all, holes in semiconductors are quasiparticles caused by a lack of real particles.

Admittedly, I know very little about quasi-particles.

Is it better than using 25 % less salt?