"Two-tenths of a second is nice, but forever is even better," Fajans said.Īnd forever may not be so far away. But they hope to drastically increase the incarceration time in future experiments. Of the millions of antihydrogen atoms the ALPHA team created, only about 38 were cold enough-and slow enough-to be held in a kind of "magnetic bowl" that prevented them from interacting with normal matter.īecause the experiments were intended only to prove that antimatter atoms could be trapped, the team let the antihydrogen atoms go after only two-tenths of a second. #Antimatter picture series#To slow them down, the team used a series of electric and magnetic fields to cool the antimatter. They were moving too fast to stay stuck in the traps we were making for them." "That was our problem with antihydrogen atoms. "If the ball is moving too fast, it won't stick in the dimple," Fajans said. The major challenge of trapping antimatter is that, once created, the particles are typically too hot and energetic to be trapped.įajans likens the task of antihydrogen trapping to games that involve tilting a toy disk to roll a ball bearing into a dimple or hole. Next came the hard-and unprecedented-part: getting the antimatter particles to sit still.Īiming for Permanent Antimatter-Atom Incarceration To get the antiprotons and positrons to bond, the team used an oscillating electric field, nudging the antiprotons into the same energy level as the positrons. The positrons were captured from a radioactive sodium source. To make the antiprotons, the team took some of the protons normally used to feed CERN's nearby Large Hadron Collider, smashed them into metal targets, and captured the byproducts. (Related: "Proton Smaller Than Thought-May Rewrite Laws of Physics.") This formed atoms of antihydrogen, the simplest antimatter element-a feat first achieved in 2002 at CERN. "It's a relief to have this step in hand."įor the new experiments, the team used CERN's ALPHA experiment, a tangle of corrugated pipes, electromagnetic "bottles," and other equipment.įirst, scientists had to create antiprotons and antielectrons, or positrons, and get them to bond. "This is the next step, and it's a key next step" toward solving that central mystery, said Surko, who did not participate in the research. (Read about a new material that may help explain why matter and antimatter are out of balance.)Ĭliff Surko, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, called the trapping of antimatter atoms "a big deal." The unprecedented trapping of antimatter atoms for study is a key step toward understanding why nature seems to abhor antimatter. "It's a central mystery in physics," said Joel Fajans, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-authored the new study, published today in the journal Nature. That's because, even though matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts during the big bang, the universe we know is made almost entirely of matter. Yet for all the similarities, scientists think matter and antimatter must differ in some other fundamental way. Whenever the matter and antimatter meet, they self-annihilate in a shower of pure energy. Theories predict that antimatter particles and matter particles have opposite electrical charges but are otherwise nearly identical. (Related: "Scientists Ponder Universe's Missing Antimatter.") (See "Antimatter-Rocket Plan Fuels Hope for Star Trek Tech.")īut the feat, undertaken a couple of months ago at the Geneva, Switzerland-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), paves the way to the potential solution of a fundamental cosmic conundrum. Though the achievement is "a big deal," it doesn't mean the antimatter bombs and engines of science fiction will be igniting anytime soon, experts say. For the first time, scientists have trapped antimatter atoms-mysterious, oppositely charged versions of ordinary atoms-a new study says.
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