Anti-matter trapped for 16 minutes.

[Zaphod_the_spacebum 0]

This is so cool.

Antimatter Trapped for Amazingly Long 16 Minutes

Antimatter, an elusive type of matter that's rare in the universe, has now been trapped for more than 16 minutes — an eternity in particle physics.

 

In fact, scientists who've been trapping antihydrogen atoms at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva say

 

isolating the exotic particles has become so routine that they expect to soon begin experiments on this rare substance.

 

Antimatter is like a mirror image of matter. For every matter particle (a hydrogen atom, for example), a matching antimatter particle is thought to exist (in this case, an antihydrogen atom) with the same mass, but the opposite charge.

 

"We've trapped antihydrogen atoms for as long as 1,000 seconds, which is forever" in the world of high-energy particle physics, said Joel Fajans, a University of California, Berkeley professor of physics who is a faculty scientist at California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) experiment at CERN.

 

Trapping antimatter is difficult, because when it comes into contact with matter, the two annihilate each other. So a container for antimatter can't be made of regular matter, but is usually formed with magnetic fields. In the ALPHA project, the researchers captured antihydrogen by mixing antiprotons with positrons — antielectrons — in a vacuum chamber, where they combine into antihydrogen atoms.

 

The whole process occurred within a magnetic "bottle" that takes advantage of the magnetic properties of the antiatoms to keep them contained. An actual bottle, made of ordinary matter, would not be able to hold antimatter because when the two types of matter meet they annihilate.

 

After the researchers had trapped antimatter in the magnetic bottle, they could then detect the trapped antiatoms by turning off the magnetic field and allowing the particles to annihiliate with normal matter, which creates a flash of light.

 

The team has now managed to capture 112 antiatoms in this new trap for times ranging from one-fifth of a second to 1,000 seconds, or 16 minutes and 40 seconds. (To date, since the beginning of the project, Fajans and his colleagues have trapped 309 antihydrogen atoms in various traps.)

 

And the researchers plan to improve on that, with the "hope that by 2012 we will have a new trap with laser access to allow spectroscopic experiments on the antiatoms," Fajans said in a statement. Those experiments would give researchers more information on the antimatter's properties.

 

In that way, it could help to answer a question that has long plagued physicists: Why is there only ordinary matter in our universe? Scientists think antimatter and matter should have been produced in equal amounts during the Big Bang that created the universe 13.6 billion years ago. [The Coolest Little Particles in Nature]

 

Today, however, there is no evidence of antimatter galaxies or clouds, and antimatter is seen rarely and for only short periods, for example, during some types of radioactive decay before it annihilates in a collision with normal matter.

 

The researchers detail their work on the antimatter trap in a new paper published online June 5 in the journal Nature Physics.

 

Zaphod

 

(Link removed and replaced with text of article. Sorry, Zaphod, we don't allow external links in e-mails as a general rule. Thanks. -A9)

[V'Roy 0]

What do they do with the antimatter when they capture it? Sell it on eBay? Let the grandkids have their picture taken by it? Throw the antimatter back if it's not big enough?

[Zaphod_the_spacebum 0]

(Link removed and replaced with text of article. Sorry, Zaphod, we don't allow external links in e-mails as a general rule. Thanks. -A9)

 

 

It's cool A9. I should have remembered that. Thanks for fixing it for me. :)

 

Zaphod

 

 

 

[Zaphod_the_spacebum 0]

What do they do with the antimatter when they capture it? Sell it on eBay? Let the grandkids have their picture taken by it? Throw the antimatter back if it's not big enough?

 

 

 

Well, according to the article, the antimatter is annihilated by regular matter on contact. But, according to the scientist's earlier experiments, it could be used as a powerful, clean energy source. When the first scientist captured man made antimatter a few years ago, he theorized that a bottle of antimatter the size of a golf ball could power a home for years. Antimatter could also be used to power spaceships, I/E Star Trek. They're going to start scanning the antimatter with a laser spectroscope to find out just how much power is produced when it collides with matter. I can see matter/antimatter reactors powering cities, space stations and even starships in the next century. I'm a Treknobabble nerd. I love seeing technologies that were just sci-fi decades ago becoming reality.

It would be cool to see what antimatter made with Deuterium produces. ;) Scientists used Deuterium in 2009 as a fuel. in the first laser fusion reactor last year.

 

Zaphod

Edited June 6, 2011 by Zaphod_the_spacebum

[V'Roy 0]

At this point it's all theoretical. We really don't know if there will be a release of energy or not. Even if there is, it might only be enough to power the containment field that stores the antimatter.

 

Consider that all matter has at least some energy. Consider also that all energy has at least some matter. To completely separate matter and energy is an impossibility. We know there is matter and antimatter. Therefore it also makes sense that there would be energy and antienergy. When the matter and antimatter cancel each other out it is also possible that the energy and antienergy will also cancel out. I'm not an engineer, I only play one in sim, but that is what makes sense to me.

 

One thing we can deduce, however, is all the stuff we see in Trek about matter and anitmatter being kept in separate storage units and then allowed to mix can't happen as we have seen. The antimatter unit would have to have some kind of energy liner in it.

[TKAR 0]

YES I saw it i wonder what gene roddenberry/majel/deforest and jimmy would have said about it if they were still alive..