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Gold electrodes are inserted into a vacuum chamber and cooling assembly. These electrodes are a key part of the trap in which positrons and antiprotons are "mixed" to form antihydrogen.
After years of effort, scientists have confirmed that they've corralled individual atoms of antimatter.
"We're over the moon," Aarhus University's Jeffrey Hangst, spokesman of the ALPHA collaboration at Europe's CERN particle-physics center, told me today. "I think this was the hardest step in the whole business."
Hangst and his ALPHA colleagues report the breakthrough in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.
What's so big about making antimatter? On one level, it sounds like the sort of thing mad scientists would do -- for instance, in the Dan Brown thriller "Angels and Demons," which was made into a movie last year. But on a deeper level, studying antimatter sheds light on the fundamental structure of the universe.
In the beginning, equal amounts of matter and antimatter came into existence. At least that's what scientists believe. Today, antimatter is virtually absent in the natural world. Physicists assume that all that antimatter was annihilated when it came into contact with matter -- and that for some as-yet-unknown reason, the matter we know and love had enough of an advantage for a remnant to survive.
Some of the scientists at CERN are using the Large Hadron Collider to sort out that antimatter mystery, but Hangst and others work at a different facility, known as the Antimatter Decelerator. ALPHA is one of the scientific collaborations that has been mixing antiparticles -- positrons and antiprotons -- to try to create whole atoms of antihydrogen.
It's not easy, because of that mutual-annihilation issue. Hangst said the first trick was to combine the particles in a super-cold vacuum setting --- less than 0.5 Kelvin, or -458.8 degrees Fahrenheit. That way, the particles don't instantly jump away and fizzle out. The second trick is to build a magnetic trap to help contain the particles so that they don't instantly decay. And there's a third trick: designing a system capable of verifying that the atoms actually exist.
"You must have a trap, and you must be cold, and you must be able to detect that you've done this," Hangst said.
The ALPHA team's detection system looked for the particles given off when the anti-atoms eventually decayed.
"When antihydrogen decays inside the ALPHA experiment, it emits particles, called pions, from the point at which it exists," the University of Liverpool's Paul Nolan, another member of the ALPHA team, explained in a news release. "Our detector surrounds the area where antihydrogen is formed, and for each pion emitted we get three points as it travels outwards. Using a computer, we can then construct a line between these points and trace it back to the origin of the antihydrogen."
When tens of millions of antiparticles were combined within ALPHA's magnetic trap, the system spotted 38 "annihilation events," verifying the existence of 38 antihydrogen atoms. The atoms lasted for just a tenth of a second, but even that duration would be long enough to allow for further study.
Hangst said the detection marked a "giant leap" toward understanding the properties of antihydrogen, and perhaps eventually sorting out the mystery behind the matter-antimatter imbalance. "Now we have to design the next device, the one that can actually do precision measurements," he said.
Hangst now feels the next giant leap -- measuring the spectrum of antihydrogen and seeing how it compares with regular hydrogen -- is in sight. "I've never been more confident that we can do this," he told me. "It's going to take some years, but the dream of shining laser light on antihydrogen and interrogating its structure is close now."
ALPHA isn't the only scientific collaboration trying to make antihydrogen. Another group, called ATRAP, is using the same facility. "This was a race between us and ATRAP, trying to do the same thing with different techniques," Hangst said.
And in a news release issued today, CERN noted that another collaboration, ASACUSA, has demonstrated yet another method for making antihydrogen atoms. ASACUSA's scientists report in a paper appearing in Physical Review Letters that they produced antihydrogen in a Cusp trap, which CERN says is an "essential precursor" for making a beam.
"With two alternative methods of producing and eventually studying antihydrogen, antimatter will not be able to hide its properties from us much longer," Yasunori Yamazaki, a physicist at Japan's RIKEN research center and a member of the ASACUSA collaboration, said in CERN's news release.
But will the bad guys use all this information to build an antimatter bomb like the one in "Angels and Demons"? That scenario is still pure science fiction, and you can hear theoretical physicist Michio Kaku explain why in our "Nightmares and Dreams" interactive.
More about antimatter:
- Inside the antimatter factory
- Antimatter particles detected deep below
- Antimatter scout to hitch ride on shuttle
- Laser technique produces blast of antimatter
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.
Leave a Comment:
Wow! This is a breakthrough. I would be interested in why the statement is made that an antimatter bomb would be impossible or "pure science fiction". I thought that anti-matter would be something that hopefully we could harness in some way, some day.
Bigger question, is the decay of the anithydrogen a property of antihydrogen or did a particle of normal matter make it's way into the containment area? Obviously they were aware of this happening since they set up a detector for this condition. But do they know why it happens?
Because:
1. the particles only lasted a tenth of a second before decaying
2. requires special conditions impossible to achieve outside of a lab on earth
3. the amount generated at a time would require years to produce enough for a serious bomb if conditions 1 and 2 weren't present
Nuclear power was science fiction just a few decades before it became a reality. I don't claim to know the basics of antimatter, but I know not to count it out just because it sounds outlandish.
The article said it was science fiction right now. Michio Kaku explains that the problem with it right now is that fact that it's very difficult to hold onto without it annihilating itself, it's extraordinarily expensive to make (His words were bankrupt the US or the world.) and lastly the fact that all the antimatter created to date wouldn't be enough to light up a light bulb.
Gneisenau : The article says to make a bomb of anitmatter is science fiction. The making of antimatter is easy, PET scanners (Positron Emission Tomography) are used all the time in hospitals. It's the organizing of the particles to create antihydrogen and containing it is the breakthrough here.
TReed, based on the paper, it sounds as if the antihydrogen atoms encounter ordinary matter and are annihilated near the trap's Penning electrodes when the magnetic field in the trap is turned off. The results of the decay -- principally pions -- are detected when they hit silicon modules outside the trap.
Anti-hydrogen has been already made at Fermilab in 1996.
http://ppd.fnal.gov/experiments/hbar/
The LHC is an amazing machine and I am sure it can make more anti-hydrogen and faster but this article makes it look like is a scientific discovery rather than an engineering improvement.
Thanks Alan. That helps to explain how they detected there presence.
I think there is so much more we can do with this than 'harness' it. I think the importance in this discovery is that we know how to 'make' it artificially now and what it takes to contain it long enough to study it's properties. Scientific fact begins as a theory that must be reproducible in the lab before it can be considered fact. Like myself, I learned the principles of radio by tearing apart old radios to understand how they worked. From there I went to more advanced electronics. Knowing the principles of antimatter can lead to larger and more significant discoveries in physics. We are outgrowing our planet and to survive as a species we may have to relocate at some point in the future. The better we understand the physics of our universe the better our chances of survival. Now we just need to figure out a way to preserve our knowledge so we don't lose it during catastrophies. The Sumarians wrote theirs in stone.
I wonder what's next? Further proof of Einstein's Relativity or Special Relativity theories? Quantum Mechanics experiments with our new knowledge of antimatter? Experiments with intergalactic travel without using linear propulsion? I sure wish I could add about 100-200 years to my life so I could experience the future. This is very exciting!
Mr. Boyle, Thank you for a very thought provoking article!
I thought we already had it. weren't all those mortgage CDO "sorta-securities" written on anti-paper?
Maybe black holes are where all of the "missing" anti-matter is located.
I believe that has already been hypothesized before. That a matter/antimatter pair materializes near the event horizon and the antimatter atom flies in and the matter atom flies away.
I never heard why the antimatter atom would always materialize on the wrong side of the event horizon, of that it could explain the huge amount of matter we see though.
Gneisenau - I think you're thinking of Hawking radiation. The material in Hawking radiation, as I understand, is not matter and anti-matter, but a particle pair, one of which is normal in this universe (as both matter and anti-matter could be considered), and the other being "exotic" (it theoretically contains negative energy).
From my understanding, these particles are theorized to be produced all the time in any kind of energy field (basically anywhere inside the universe), but in a normal setting they instantly collapse back to "empty space." However, near a black hole horizon, one particle could be sucked in (the particle with "negative energy") while the positive energy particle escapes outside the event horizon, thus producing a radiative effect, while simultaneously accounting for the decay of black holes. I'm not sure about the specifics, I only get this from reading Hawking's books, not his papers, and my math skills aren't what they used to be.
Still, fascinating indeed.
@ Janstince - No, it's more than that. I was watching a show on the Discovery channel or one of those similar ones and they were trying to explain several theories why there is more matter in the universe than antimatter. This was one of the theories. They were speaking of a matter/antimatter pair.
Still it didn't go into enough depth to really explain why the quantities of matter -vs- antimatter that got swallowed wasn't 50/50.
Ah, fantastic! We are watching the world progress.
Now, bring on the "why aren't these scientists trying to cure cancer instead?" comments.
nice
Maybe they can cure cancer with anti-matter *smirk*
We are trying to cure cancer.
The processing power of computers is doubling every 18 months (moore's law), and is processing the possiblities as we speak.
This will be a fantastic century for medicine thanks to the computer's increasing ability to seek and find the truth.
Science is the Fact Based search for the Truth that will set us Free!
You can help by dowloading a piece of the research yourself and letting your computer process it joining with thousands of others to make one giant research computer!
No, I mean... oh, nevermind. Sarcasm is hard on these internets.
Unfortunately, the breakthrough ideas that lead to new insight dont come from computers. They sure can help a lot but I've yet to see a computer listed as an inventor on a patent.
Creativity and intuition, the sources of breakthrough sceince ideas, arent the computer's strong suit.
The computer is a tool in the search of knowledge. I think it's ironic the human genome was first decoded with the help of the computer scientist's from the department of energy. The science may be different but the computer techniques can be passed onto other areas as what with the department of energy folks.
Social : If you set up your computer for the Stanford grid, can you get access to some of the work? I would really like to see some of the work on protein folding.
I'm interested in knowing how the positrons(postive electrons) and antiprotons were created. Where do they come from? How do we take a (negative) electron and make it postive?
Positrons are made by positron emission radioactive decay (through weak interactions), or by pair production from a sufficiently energetic photon. (wikipedia)
I think the anti-protons are made from high-energy collisions of protons. Could be an oversimplification, though.
CERN has just landed on the moon. One small step for man...
Highest congratulations to all involved!
Indeed. This is HUGE! Congrats to the men and women who made it possible.
The writer of this article should be shot through one of those particle accelerators for being an idiot. Have you even considered that not everyone has read Angels and Demons? Why the blank would you give up the plot of this book?
You must have an antimatter brain to pull a stunt like this off.
The very first paragraph discussing the plot on Wikipedia is:
"The plot follows Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon, as he tries to stop what seems to be the Illuminati, a legendary secret society, from destroying Vatican City with the newly discovered power of antimatter."
Doesn't seem like it's a big plot spoiler or anything. Would you lynch someone for revealing that Rosebud was a sled? OH GOD WHAT IF SOMEONE DIDN'T WATCH CITIZEN KANE YET
are you seriously saying that he gave away secrets to the nuances of that book? NUTS!
ROSEBUD was a Shed!! ; (
spoiler alert...
Ewan McGregor ....is .........Obiwan.
....oh I really want to give away the ending of Angels and Demons now. If you haven't read it or seen the movie and you want to then it's your own fault for being a slow poke with not enough time to read the book you so clearly want to read.
saying "they make antimatter" in Dan Brown's 'Angels and Demons' in no way "gives away" the plot. I haven't read the book but it is the first scene of the movie. Even breakingglass' comment doesn't really ruin anything. There, consider it spoiled. ;-P
... And "The Da Vinci Code" is about the Virgin Mary. Sorry to spoil that one for you, too. ;-)
I agree Joe American, I never read Angel and Demons. Star Trek would have been a better example from fiction.
I can't imagine that you are actually this upset about the plot from a 10-year-old book.
Seriously, Dan Brown reads like a meth-addict turning in a term paper- the whole antimatter angle is revealed within a chapter or two, as are all his big "plot" elements... And he always leaves every chapter on a cliff hanger-- will Langdon get out of the locked and sealed doors of the Vatican's library as his oxygen is depleted and alligators circle just outside the doorway, which is coated in fire and guarded by the Illumaniti's chief assassin who is also a templar priest as well as an alligator wrangler, and just may have the final clue to the location of the Ark of the Covenant as described in a prophecy written in the blood of Mary Magdalene on an authentic piece of the Necronomicon? Stay tuned for the next exciting chapter OF.... Crap.
"...authentic piece of the Necronomicon?" Good one!
Well done. Can't wait for the next find.
Antimatter isn't all bad, on the fictional front, its what powers the Enterprise in Star Trek.
It will power the Enterprise in reality!
Beam me up, Scotty!
Scotty, give me warp factor nine!!!
All we need now are dilithium crystals to regulate the speed at which the antimatter interacts with matter and channel the energy through some specialized coils
(apparently I wasn't the only person who to have the same thought here)
Now, if we only had some dilithium crystals.
(darn, I waited to long to hit "post comment")
this is so much fun reading about this stuff. love it, love it, love it!!!
"Fasinating..."
I'm sorry, but my poor monkey brain cannot comprehend this new development.
I know it's important because Mob Barley said it was and he's never lied to me before, but what does it mean for Joe and Joline six-pack?
Will it lower my heating bill?
Make me younger and better looking?
Tell me what this means to me way out here on the prairie.
It can make the prarie dogs glow in the dark so you can shoot them easier.
Next step, anti-gravity! To the Moon, Alice!
nothing! that's anti-something FYI!
Matter-antimatter reactions can be used for various purposes. PET scans have been in use for a while (but that's nothing new). This is huge because of what it can lead to. It could lead to vastly superior energy production which would lower that heat bill (but we need to be able to produce antimatter more efficiently so it won't lower the heat bill soon). "Antimatter rockets" are a possibility. (but that really doesn't help Joe & Joline sixpack). I don't know how it's going to help out on the prairie Skip. Most importantly for me is that it should clear up some big questions as to the formation of the universe.
It helps lots of things out here on the prairie. One should remember that Einstein got his thoughts cooking by looking at a tower clock while riding on a train and pondering what time would be if the train were traveling at the speed of light. Some smart farmer might be pondering antimatter while harvesting corn, and say to himself, " If the corn was composed of antimatter, would it still appear yellow? ", and come up with all sorts of genius speculations about how antimatter might affect the spectrum(s) of light, and do to Newton's spectral analysis, what Einstein did to Newton's gravity.
Now that we have a virtually inexhaustible source of power, can I please have that flying car that scientists have been promising me for the last 50 years? Been waiting a long time for that one.
Sure - it's in the mail.
HA! I've wondered at length why the flying car isn't available worldwide. I could design the system myself and have plenty of ideas but you want to know the main problem? It's the public. Generally speaking it would be very dangerous to give that many people control over the flying car. The answer to that problem is just take away control. There are lot of people working on that problem even as we speak. computer systems will control the cars, you will get in and it will take you where you want to go. It will likely only be a floating car. And they will do everything they can to make it so you can't hot wire it and have control over it. Bottom line is - unless you develop one yourself you won't have control of the flight of the car. (sorry, I just love the flying car conversation- I'll go back to the antimatter conversation now).
already got 'em. they're called helicopters. but, they are expensive and not readily available to the general public, especially on the prairie.
The future is NOW!
http://www.terrafugia.com/aircraft.html
1. I'm interested to see how these conversations all seemed to start off of an article that was about anti-hydrogens being produced and captured.
2. the flying car will be available to the public, but once a system has been created, the BIGGEST PROBLEM is COMMUNICATION. it is a good start, GPS systems, On Star, etc. but to make flying cars available, you need all traffic on one system that communicates with everyone else. like the largest airport control tower in the history of the universe. the system would be like a big hologram. more of a small projection on your windshield to show you where to go. if the system notices an abnormality, it can instantly redirect you, and can override your system if it sees fit for your safety and for others. so mob_barley is half right. there will be less control. a reckless driver in the sky could kill many. but like i said. the biggest problem is communication. one whole communicates better than many separate individuals.
Hello World Physicists and Dr. Stephen Hawking!
I have question for myself for yrs without answer as: What is the real nature and its contents and properties of "Magnetic Field"? Same question with the "Gravitational Field"? Same question with the "Electric Field?", in other words, what's ingredients, or kinds of physical properties or masses inside these fields that create them? energy , or energy-related physical objects, elements, etc. that contribute to create these fields?
And finally, the last question is what is / are the relationship (if existed) between Magnetic Field, Gravitational Field, and Electric Field?
I do need an detail answer if someone can come up with!
Thank you
Hello Again,
I am interested to investigate all possible opportunities to understand better of the Magnetic Field, Gravitational Field, Electric Field to hope that I can get a better knowledge deeper inside the natural properties of each said field to prevent myself to pre-accept the existences of these fields without understand better their real things inside these fields!
Any possible reality that a field such as a Magnetic Field that consists of a continious "chain" of or "string" of sub-particle that have been polarized and lined up to form a line of field of Magnetic Field for example? Same with Electric Field and Gravitational Field! (?). These strings that look similar as a string that posseses lined up polarized sub-particles and negative pole of a sub-particle faces a positive pole of a next sub-particle, etc. etc., That's is my imagination in viewing a string of a Magnetic Field, and inside a Field there are countless string stay in parallel manner to form the field!
Gravity is the curvature of space time. The "field" is the mathematics which explains that curvature, because the "curvature" is mass related. Simplified, the greater the mass the tighter the curvature, so when you go into a black hole you get simplified in dimension(s) to being a strand of atoms, instead of your normal self. Let's say you're now 6 feet tall, 180 pounds with a 35 inch pants waist. You go to a black hole for a trip in. You don't go in as 6 feet tall, etc. The "forces", or this curvature of space time called gravity converts you to a noodle where your height might be measured in miles, and your waistline measured in the dimension of molecules.
Steve Herbert is somewhat incorrect, if the earth wnt into a black hole it would be COMPRESSED to about 2 inches at the entry point and continue to compress as it travelled further toward the center of the black hole. As we now know, the 'center' of a black hole is an exciting atomic reaction which writes in own laws of physics. Laws which we have no real comprehension of yet. As planets are'sucked' in they compress and begin to whiplash around the center...
SouthernGent, I believe you're thinking of the size the earth would have to be to be dense enough to become a black hole itself. When you pass an event horizon, the gravity increases so much that the gravity at your feet is stronger than the gravity on your head. The process is called "spaghettification", believe it or not. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghettification
To: Steve Herbert. Thank you for your reply! I agreed with you macroscopically and traditionally the Gravitational Field is a space-time "curvature" with "mathematics" to describe the effects causing by the gravitational field! However, in deeper investigation efforts to study inside the real, hidden nature individual properties of the Gravitational Field, then I believe that the existing physics of all kinds in our times still do not understand the secrets that glue to the unknown individual properties of a Gravitationa Field for example! I would point out my example as: a "A" Mass sits next to the "B" Mass that mutually create a gravitational field and due to these "A" and"B" masses are distanced apart with a distance "d" and between these two masses A and B the gravitationa field exists in a curvature shape or geometry! BUT! what are inside the said curvature of the gravitational field? a consecutive chains of beaded-strings of gravitational-particles that lined up in each string in the fashion that these gravitational-sub-particles are polarized (?) in the negative and positive fashion to hold them together in string pattern??
I do not understand the real natures(?) hidden inside these Beaded-strings of gravitationa-su-particles if possibly existing yet!
My concerns that involed the said thinking and vision! and I hope all physicists should head into this direction to figure out what are inside??
Thank you
To All Physicsts and Prof. Stephen Hawking
As long as I understand that all existing physics that can only explain the effects of the GRAVITATIONAL FIELD, ELECTRIC FIELD, MAGNETIC FIELD only! but the real properties and their belongings hidden isnde these Fields are still unknown! (?)
And I wish these secrets hidden inside these fields should be well studied as I hope for! Thank You All
.
Speaking of "equal amounts of matter and antimatter", I'm wondering if the antimatter and matter went in different directions at the moment of the big bang, and instead of being annihilated, the bulk of the antimatter is still around, only in locations that don't directly affect us. Such as the other side of the universe, or perhaps in some of the other dimensions that string theorists are claiming to exist.
Hello All Theoretical Physicists
I have developed a fairly well complete sets of combination of new or novel concepts in Chaos Theorie! This work I had come up with many new conceptual approaches and studies in this very broad field as Chaos Theory that I am quite interested to invest times with! and I called this work as a grand theory in Chaos Theory due to it consists of several much broader views and approaches in the said theory that theorists previously had come up with! I want to publish this work to the scientitic communities to investigate and study on my work! Thank you
Not everything is FOR Joe & Joline of the prarie.
:P
RE:"Physicists assume that all that antimatter was annihilated when it came into contact with matter -- and that for some as-yet-unknown reason, the matter we know and love had enough of an advantage for a remnant to survive."
I was taught that there is one more negative particle than positive particle hence we have matter in our universe. Three cheers for the negatives - Hip Hip_________
I believe you meant one more particle than antiparticle.
Furthermore, Joe and Joline are (and remain) Joe and Joline of the prairie because they think only in terms of me and now.
Hello All!
In our ordinary existing matter, then atoms combined together to form matter! and an atom has a nucleus inside and being surrouned by electron clouds from outside! So, if anti-matter really exists, then its structure could possibly be formed reversely, respect to the known pattern of matter we know so far? That means anti matter has its nucleus which has opposite electric charge? and clouds of particles of this anti-matter also possibly are formed opposite respect to our known matter? or something we do not understand yet? In general, It seems to be that anti-matter that is still too far from the reach of human's existing capability?
What a great achievement. WOW. I love living now- things are so interesting everywhere!
What bugs me is that all of this could be happening HERE in the U.S., if those hacks in Congress had funded Waxahatchie years ago- they didn't want to spend $600 meg, because they didn't see any use for the acellerator. The stupiditdy is jusst so deprerssing....
BUT, at least it's getting done! I can' wait to see what's next!