Antimatter

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN have reportedly created, captured, and released antimatter in the form of anti-hydrogen, a positron orbiting an antiproton nucleus:

Scientists working on the big bang machine in Geneva have done the seemingly impossible: create, capture and release antimatter.

The development could help researchers devise laboratory experiments to learn more about this strange substance, which mostly disappeared from the universe shortly after the Big Bang around 14 billion years ago.

Trapping any form of antimatter is difficult, because as soon as it meets normal matter — the stuff Earth and everything on it is made out of — the two annihilate each other in powerful explosions.

In a new study, physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva were able to create 38 antihydrogen atoms and preserve each for more than one-tenth of a second. The project was part of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser PHysics Apparatus) experiment, an international collaboration that includes physicists from the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL).

Investigating its properties should be fascinating.

More here including how they did it and what they plan to do next.

6 comments… add one
  • Brett Link

    Hopefully it involves storing larger bits of it for longer periods of time. That stuff is useful for hypothetical long-distance space travel.

  • michael reynolds Link

    Sure, it’s all fun and games until some super-villain creates the anti-beer particle.

  • sam Link

    ” one-tenth of a second” — That’s nearly an eternity for short-lived subatomic particles.

  • Seems like a good time to post this excellent, geeky rap video on the LHC.

  • I note that we still haven’t disappeared into a black hole. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing at this point.

  • sam Link

    “I note that we still haven’t disappeared into a black hole. I’m not entirely sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing at this point.”

    Well, maybe we have and have come out the “other side”. How would we know?

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