Antimatter atom trapped for first time, say scientists

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Antimatter atom trapped for first time, say scientists

Antimatter atoms have been trapped for the first time, scientists say.

Researchers at Cern, home of the Large Hadron Collider, have held 38 antihydrogen atoms in place, each for a fraction of a second.

Antihydrogen has been produced before but it was instantly destroyed when it encountered normal matter.

The team, reporting in Nature, says the ability to study such antimatter atoms will allow previously impossible tests of fundamental tenets of physics.

This is certainly a good sign. Couple this with the new Fusion experiment getting ready to take place in Southern Californis and it looks like we might be making some decent advances in these 2 areas.

A few other articles linked:
New clue to anti-matter mystery
Antimatter is mass-produced

when i visited cern last november they had only managed to create 7 antihydrogens, over the span of somthing like 20 years, so creating 38 at once is rather a big step seeing as they havent been able to create any segnificant amount of years. but if its true on the physics front

reply to post by Xcathdra
Since this "anti-matter" is trapped does anyone think it will chew off it's anti-matter arm to escape? Our first specimen will be disfigured.

reply to post by thewanger


Thats why they captured 38 of them. Since they all will chew their arms off differently, we can study each and complete a full replica, insteaad of the disfigured one.

haha reminds me of "crisis on infinite earths" the epic DC comics crossover from 1985. a scientist from a parallel earth wanted to recreate the conditions of the big bang to discover the origin of the universe, only it resulted in the release of anti-matter which destroyed the multi-verse! and who says comics are for kids

Here is the link to the Fusion Power Project I mentioned.

The £2.2billion superlab where scientists are creating a star on Earth

According to the National Ignition Facility (NIF) team in Livermore, on November 2 they fired up the 192 lasers beams at the centre of the reactor and aimed them at a glass target containing tritium and deuterium gas.
The resulting release of energy was of a magnitude of 1.3 million mega joules, which was a world record and the peak radiation temperature measure at the core was approximately six million degrees Fahrenheit.
For a direct comparison, the temperature at the centre of the sun is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit.
However, this recent experiment was not 'live' in that no self-sustaining fusion reaction was set off, although the scientists at NIF are extremely confident for the future.


Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk...

Big deal. Dan Brown had in his novel an entire canister of contained antimatter, and according to the blurb at the front, all the technology in his book is real! /sarcasm

Seriously, though, this is quite impressive. I don't think it's the amount of antimatter that seems to be a big deal (though maybe it also is) but the fact that they managed to keep it around for much longer than any previous antimatter.

Here is another article talkina more in depth about what transpired.

In breakthrough, scientists trap antimatter atoms

Hangst and his colleagues, who included scientists from Britain, Brazil, Canada, Israel and the United States, trapped 38 anti-hydrogen atoms individually. Hangst says that since the experiments they reported in Nature, they've been able to hold on to the atoms even longer.

"Unfortunately I can't tell you how long, because we haven't published the number yet," Hangst told the AP. "But I can tell you that it's much, much longer than a tenth of a second. Within human comprehension on a real clock."

Studying such trapped atoms could help answer basic questions in physics, like why antimatter has disappeared from the natural universe while ordinary matter abounds in the stars, planets and galaxies. Theorists say both must have been created in equal amounts in the Big Bang.

Two teams had been competing to trap anti-hydrogen atoms at CERN, the world's largest physics lab best known for its $10 billion smasher, the Large Hadron Collider. The collider, built deep under the Swiss-French border, wasn't used for this experiment.

i heard that this antimatter, probably 1 "piece" of antimatter, could power a space shuttle to the moon and back somehow. could someone explain this to me? if we could control the catastrophic nature of the explosion it causes in short bursts......or something of that nature.

reply to post by colonelblake


Its what you see in Startrek. A Matter-Anti Matter power source that literally creates massive amounts of energy from anhiliating itself.

In short because the wiki entry is so long -

Anti Matter - Wiki

In antimatter-matter collisions resulting in photon emission, the entire rest mass of the particles is converted to kinetic energy. The energy per unit mass (9×1016 J/kg) is about 10 orders of magnitude greater than chemical energy (compared to TNT at 4.2×106 J/kg, and formation of water at 1.56×107 J/kg), about 4 orders of magnitude greater than nuclear energy that can be liberated today using nuclear fission (about 200 MeV per atomic nucleus that undergoes nuclear fission,[31] or 8×1013 J/kg), and about 2 orders of magnitude greater than the best possible from fusion (about 6.3×1014 J/kg for the proton-proton chain).

The reaction of 1 kg of antimatter with 1 kg of matter would produce 1.8×1017 J (180 petajoules) of energy (by the mass-energy equivalence formula E = mc²), or the rough equivalent of 43 megatons of TNT. For comparison, Tsar Bomb, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated, reacted an estimated yield of 50 megatons, which required the use of tens of kilograms[citation needed] of fissile material (Uranium/Plutonium) (hundreds for the full-yield 100 megaton design), and two tons of lithium deuteride (fusion fuel).[32]

and...

Memory Alpha

My personal opinion is to wait for Stephen Hawking to finsih his work on this area. Everytime I go to read it, I get the feeling an anyeurism is about to kick off in my brain.

So basicaly 1 KG of this stuff is TSAR bomba? And I bet 1 KG could be compressed into a really small space....


I'm curious as to how we came about building and even getting funding for PC's like CERN. Did we reverse engineer some ET tech's a while back and figure out the basic concept as a particle collider?

What makes these PC's so intriguing that some countries spend billions on them? What does it yeild monetarily? Unless there is something they know we don't know...

Sure smashing particles will show us smaller sub atomic particles, and we can learn from it. I just don't see how governments are so interested in learning.... why don't they spend billions on other scientific endeavous (referrfing mostly to the haldron PC)...

reply to post by v1rtu0s0


The concept behind CERN, which has been building steam for many years now, is the realization that in order to solve problems the entire world, and not just a few countries, face. Energy is the big one.

Cern cost around 10 billion if I remeber right, and only a limited number of countries could outright spend that type of money on their own. The concept is to create an international groups where the cost / operations are spread out over all the countries who are participating in it, from money, to resources, to scientists etc.

If we could remove polotics, military, and ethnocentricity, cooperation in this area is paramount to sovling the Earths problems.

the other larger controversy is that they created a big bang. basically wiping out the theory of a divine creation.
dan brown should be all over this in a couple of years. lol.

Originally posted by colonelblake
the other larger controversy is that they created a big bang. basically wiping out the theory of a divine creation.
dan brown should be all over this in a couple of years. lol.

edit on 22-11-2010 by colonelblake because: (no reason given)

An easy workaround on that argument is Humans were created in Gods Image. Who is to say we werent also blessed with the ability to think like our creator as well, to create something he created?

It preserves the divine creation argument by saying the divine creator allowed us to do it. The argument over free will, on whether humans pretending to be god is a good idea or not, is also created by divine intervention.

i was speaking about the bible in that "god said let there be light"
or did the big bang create light?

Originally posted by colonelblake
the other larger controversy is that they created a big bang. basically wiping out the theory of a divine creation.
dan brown should be all over this in a couple of years. lol.

edit on 22-11-2010 by colonelblake because: (no reason given)

Please don't spread disinfo. The newspaper headline of them creating a mini-big bang is misleading and simply typical media sensationalism. They did not create a mini-big bang or any other kind of big bang.

What they did was reproduce the theorized environment immediately following the big bang. Essentially, scientists theorize that right after the Big Bang, all of the subatomic particles were seperate, existing as a kind of 'soup' of subatomic particles. In the milliseconds following the Big Bang, these seperate subatomic particles began to come together to form matter as we know it. The LHC did not create a mini-Big Bang, they just smashed particles together so hard that they were broken down into their constituent subatomic particles, reproducing this theorized point in time. There was never any kind of chance that a new universe would spawn or the like. It was simply the media trying to get people to read a story.

hmm, my news source dropped the "big bang" wording out of the LHC news. i cant retort with a suitable comment.