Antimatter atoms are corralled even longer
JUN 06, 2011
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.025368
BBC : The ALPHA collaboration at CERN has succeeded in trapping anti-hydrogen atoms for more than 15 minutes . That is a significant improvement on the team’s efforts reported last year, writes the BBC’s Jonathan Amos. Laboratories such as CERN can make antimatter; the difficulty up to now has been retaining the material for longer than a fraction of a second, as it is eliminated on contact with “normal” matter. The ALPHA team developed a “magnetic bottle,” which uses magnetic fields and cooling techniques to keep the anti-hydrogen atoms at half a degree above absolute zero. That gives the trapped atoms time to return from the excited state in which they’re produced to their normal state. The next step for the group is to use microwaves to probe anti-hydrogen’s structure and to see how they behave in normal gravitational fields.
© 2011 American Institute of Physics
