First Antimatter Atoms Created and Trapped - UPI.com
Online, November 18, 2010 (Newswire.com) - GENEVA, Switzerland, (UPI) -- Atoms of antimatter, long the stuff of science fiction, have been trapped for the first time, European researchers at the Large Hadron Collider say.
Scientists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) have trapped and held 38 anti-hydrogen atoms in place, each for a fraction of a second, the BBC reported Wednesday.
While anti-hydrogen has been produced before, it was instantly destroyed when it encountered normal matter.
The CERN team, writing in the journal Nature, says the ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental laws of physics.
The present "standard model" of physics says each type of particle -- protons, electrons, neutrons and a collection of more exotic particles -- has its mirror image antiparticle.
Physicists have long wondered why the universe is made up overwhelmingly of matter rather than antimatter. The laws of physics do not favor one over the other, leaving the expectation that equal amounts would have been created during the Big Bang.
Producing antimatter particles such as positrons and anti-protons has become commonplace in the laboratory, but assembling the particles into antimatter atoms is far more difficult.
The team says among 10 million anti-protons and 700 million positrons they produced, 38 stable atoms of anti-hydrogen were formed, lasting about 0.2 second each.
The next step, the team said, to produce more of the atoms and hold them longer in order to study them more closely.
"What we'd like to do is see if there's some difference that we don't understand yet between matter and antimatter," says Jeff Hangst of Aarhus University in Denmark, one of the collaborators on the project.
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