Scientists at cern have managed to isolate antimatter and stop it's spontaneously cancelling out upon contact with it's symmetrical partner!



"The ALPHA experiment at CERN has taken an important step forward in developing techniques to understand one of the Universe’s open questions: is there a difference between matter and antimatter? In a paper published in Nature today, the collaboration shows that it has successfully produced and trapped atoms of antihydrogen. This development opens the path to new ways of making detailed measurements of antihydrogen, which will in turn allow scientists to compare matter and antimatter.

Antimatter – or the lack of it – remains one of the biggest mysteries of science. Matter and its counterpart are identical except for opposite charge, and they annihilate when they meet. At the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been produced in equal amounts. However, we know that our world is made up of matter: antimatter seems to have disappeared. To find out what has happened to it, scientists employ a range of methods to investigate whether a tiny difference in the properties of matter and antimatter could point towards an explanation."

http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressRele...2.10E.html

Tsk. Dan Brown did this in Angels & Demons years ago. Don't CERN have any original ideas? What are they going to do next...make bombs with it? *rolls eyes*

Lmao, that was the single dumbest fucking plot lines ever

Well, must be one of those strange coincidences, but I had this exact same conversation at work the other day.

I was talking about antimatter, and my collegue brought up the Angels & Demons line, then dismissed it as rubbish. Nice, I can't wait to see him again.

Angels and Demons wasn't THAT bad. The book was written badly but I found the movie enjoyable.


Anyway, the article says that they are only trapped for a tenth of a second. Do the antihydrogen atoms escape the magnetic field and annihilate with the hydrogen or do they decay into smaller particles?

(November 18, 2010 at 1:40 am)ib.me.ub Wrote: Well, must be one of those strange coincidences, but I had this exact same conversation at work the other day.

I was talking about antimatter, and my collegue brought up the Angels & Demons line, then dismissed it as rubbish. Nice, I can't wait to see him again.

It was rubbish There was a visible blue/black glowing thing in a container

I will have to watch the movie ;-). Actually, I might watch it tonight!

Edit: Movie was absolute rubbish. Watched about 30 minutes, then turned it off.

Same Except I don't think I even lasted that long.

(November 18, 2010 at 9:43 am)The Skeptic Wrote: Angels and Demons wasn't THAT bad. The book was written badly but I found the movie enjoyable.


Anyway, the article says that they are only trapped for a tenth of a second. Do the antihydrogen atoms escape the magnetic field and annihilate with the hydrogen or do they decay into smaller particles?

I believe antihydrogen atoms would be stable until annihilation by contact with normal atoms, unless they happen to make antitritiums, which seem silly if all they are after is simplest antimatter they can make. In any case, tritium protons would remain antiprotons even after decay. I can't imagine why a containment that works for 1/10 of a second won't work for arbitrary length of time, unless something is heating the antihydrogen to the point where it would gain the kinetic energy to escape. More likely it was a demand to prove a concept that has been met in 0.1 seconds. It seems to me the only way they would know they trapped antimatter would be to break containment and watch for the annihilation.

Great article though I would have liked it to brush upon Baryon asymmetry in more detail, antimatter itself is no mystery to us, but the absence of it (at least they mentioned that) in the universe lacking an explanation is a major unresolved problem in physics.

(November 18, 2010 at 9:43 am)The Skeptic Wrote: Anyway, the article says that they are only trapped for a tenth of a second. Do the antihydrogen atoms escape the magnetic field and annihilate with the hydrogen or do they decay into smaller particles?

Trying to preserve any amount of concentrated antimatter in electromagnetic traps for any length of time is incredibly difficult, when making antiprotons, they're negatively charged and so they repel away from each other into the container (matter) and annihilate upon contact.