anti-matter contained for 17 mins? Woohoo, engage warp drive!

[Relic]

CERN Scientists Trap Antimatter for Almost 17 Minutes | News & Opinion | PCMag.com

CERN Scientists Trap Antimatter for Almost 17 Minutes

What happened to antimatter? That's the grand riddle that scientists are attempting to piece together, but it takes quite a bit of work to conduct experiments on the elusive mirror image of matter (remember, matter is anything that has a volume and occupies mass).

But CERN scientists have now been able to isolate unstable antimatter for a grand total of nearly 17 minutes. That's a far cry from experiments performed last fall, when scientists were only able to record the presence of antimatter for fractions of seconds. The increased longevity should now give researchers the time they need to perform studies on antiatoms related to charge-parity-time reversal (CPT) symmetry.

So just how difficult is it to trap antimatter for study? Just like in Star Trek, the combination of matter and antimatter particles leads to the annihilation of both and the production of a small flash of energy. Thus, to successfully trap antimatter, researchers use magnetic fields to contain antiatoms. When they turn off the field, the resulting annihilation events–recorded by a special detector–clue the scientists into just how many antiatoms are left after a set period of containment time.

"In the beginning we were turning off our trap as soon as possible after each attempt to make anti-atoms, so as not to miss any," said the University of California, Berkeley's Joel Fajans.

In the case of CERN's research, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research has been experimenting with the creation of antihydrogen atoms. The longer lifespan of these antihydrogen atoms will now allow researchers to perform more precise spectroscopy and comparisons of these antimatter elements against their hydrogen counterparts.

In doing so, scientists hope to start working their way toward an answer to the ultimate question: Why nature favored matter over antimatter at the creation of the universe, even though the two should have been fashioned in equal amounts (and subsequently annihilated each other, we suppose). They didn't, which violated CPT symmetry, or the position that particle charges, parities, and time flows should not be predisposed in one direction or another. In our universe, for example, positive charges favor heavy particles, matter is favored over antimatter, and forward time is favored over reverse.

"Any hint of CPT symmetry breaking would require a serious rethink of our understanding of nature," said Jeffrey Hangst, a professor at Aarhus University in Denmark. "But half of the universe has gone missing, so some kind of rethink is apparently on the agenda."

CERN's full study was published in the journal Nature Physics: "Confinement of antihydrogen for 1,000 seconds."

[i_got_a_mohawk]

nice

[champbassist]

Wow. Scary.

[machine gewehr]

Wow...that is just too awesome!

[Jimbob Jones]

Right. Quit researchin' and give it to the engineers so they can make something fly.

[i_got_a_mohawk]

Originally Posted by Jimbob Jones

Right. Quit researchin' and give it to the engineers so they can make something fly.

Naah, you need scientists to make something work. Engineers just repackage it all

[Old Joe]

Originally Posted by Jimbob Jones

Right. Quit researchin' and give it to the engineers so they can make something fly.

This.

[Thor]

Don't get sucked in by all this.

[Selta]

Badass!

[Relic]

Originally Posted by champbassist

Wow. Scary.

That's what I was thinking too a bit.
For all the wonderment of containing anti-matter for more than a few milliseconds, I also wonder if we're "playing with fire" in some ways though given the whole matter vs antimatter reactibility aspect?? Who knows

[MakiSupaStar]

I'm fashioning my tin-foil hat right now. Just in case.

[Selta]

Originally Posted by MakiSupaStar

I'm fashioning my tin-foil hat right now. Just in case.

Might wanna make it an anti-tin foil hat. Just sayin'.

[MakiSupaStar]

Originally Posted by Ray Salamon

Might wanna make it an anti-tin foil hat. Just sayin'.

No. That's where I'm putting my testicle protector. If we all get sucked into a black hole, I just don't want to go balls first. Trust me, I've tapped lots of holes, but that's one hole that might have more risks involved than what's covered by the protection provided by a typical jimmy.

[machine gewehr]

Originally Posted by Relic

That's what I was thinking too a bit.
For all the wonderment of containing anti-matter for more than a few milliseconds, I also wonder if we're "playing with fire" in some ways though given the whole matter vs antimatter reactibility aspect?? Who knows

How bout antimatter gun? It fires antimatter and VOILA!

[Relic]

Originally Posted by machine gewehr

How bout antimatter gun? It fires antimatter and VOILA!

air is matter - there's your first problem right there

[machine gewehr]

Originally Posted by Relic

air is matter - there's your first problem right there

Just point it at the right direction.

In worst case, all our problems will be solved.

"Death solves all problems,no man no problem." Joseph Stalin.

[6jase5]

Originally Posted by MakiSupaStar

No. That's where I'm putting my testicle protector. If we all get sucked into a black hole, I just don't want to go balls first. Trust me, I've tapped lots of holes, but that's one hole that might have more risks involved than what's covered by the protection provided by a typical jimmy.

This may work.


If not....go all in.

[Relic]

Originally Posted by machine gewehr

Just point it at the right direction.

In worst case, all our problems will be solved.

"Death solves all problems,no man no problem." Joseph Stalin.

lol! Yeah but that kind of makes the idea of going through the trouble of building an anti-matter gun a bit pointless. Just sayin'
an antimatter bomb on the other hand.....yeah I'd say that's kinda scary to think about.

[Gard]

Originally Posted by Relic

lol! Yeah but that kind of makes the idea of going through the trouble of building an anti-matter gun a bit pointless. Just sayin'
an antimatter bomb on the other hand.....yeah I'd say that's kinda scary to think about.

Something like that could make a nuke look like a firecracker - total matter to energy conversion...

[IconBasser]

... hasn't some company been harvesting and containing antimatter since the 70's? I thought I saw it on the discovery channel once.