![]() ![]() Two other new antihydrogen experiments are just getting underway at CERN. “There are 100-odd years of atomic physics that we can learn how to do again with antiatoms.”Īntihydrogen looks to be a growing field. ![]() “It’s so exciting because now we can subject antihydrogen to anything anyone has ever done with hydrogen in the past,” says Hangst. If scientists can keep more antihydrogen around for a longer period of time, they can do detailed studies such as spectral measurements that reveal how the material’s internal energetics differ from those of ordinary hydrogen. The Nature paper reports 38 such trapped atoms, which were held for up to a sixth of a second before they escaped and annihilated themselves on the side of the container. About one time out of 10, an antiproton and a positron combine to make an antihydrogen atom.įor roughly every 100,000 antihydrogen atoms made, researchers managed to trap just one of them using strong magnetic fields. The researchers nudge that cloud very gently into a couple million cold positrons. The experiment cools a stream of antiprotons into a cloud of about 40,000 particles at 40 kelvins, or 40 degrees Celsius above absolute zero. The new results come from Hangst’s experiment, known as ALPHA. In 2002 the team reported ways to make lots of antihydrogen atoms at low energies - crucial for trying to perform experiments with them. Physicists at the lab first made a few fleeting atoms of antihydrogen in 1995. Several experiments at CERN seek to explain that. Theory suggests that equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been formed in the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, and physicists have long puzzled over why matter predominates. When matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate. Just as a hydrogen atom is made of a positively charged proton and a negatively charged electron, an antihydrogen atom is made of a negatively charged antiproton and a positively charged positron. ![]() “In 10 years people will forget Dan Brown, but we’ll be in the textbooks,” says team spokesman Jeffrey Hangst, a physicist at Aarhus University in Denmark.Īntimatter, whose existence was predicted by physicist Paul Dirac in 1931, is made of particles with electric charges that are opposite those of ordinary matter. The work, reported online November 17 in Nature, is a significant step toward making antimatter stick around long enough to be able to study how it differs from ordinary matter. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2023
Categories |