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| Edited By: |Source: ANI |Updated: Mar 11, 2018, 04:10 AM IST
Scientists have revealed that they are getting closer to "bottling" antimatter.
The ALPHA experiment at CERN, including key Canadian contributors, reports that it has succeeded in storing antimatter atoms for over 16 minutes.
ALPHA managed to store twice the antihydrogen (the antimatter partner to normal hydrogen) 5,000 times longer than the previous best, setting the stage, for example, to test whether antihydrogen and normal hydrogen fall the same way due to gravity.
The lead author was Makoto Fujiwara, TRIUMF research scientist, University of Calgary adjunct professor, and spokesperson of the Canadian part of the ALPHA team.
"We know we have confined antihydrogen atoms for at least 1,000 seconds. That's almost as long as one period in hockey! This is potentially a game changer in antimatter research," Fujiwara said.
ALPHA uses an analogue of a very well known system in physics, the hydrogen atom (one electron orbiting one proton), and testing whether its antimatter twin, antihydrogen (an antielectron orbiting an antiproton), behaves the same.
"This would provide the first-ever look inside the structure of antihydrogen - element 1 on the anti-periodic table," ALPHA spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University, explained.
Canadian scientists have been playing leading roles in the antihydrogen detection and data analysis aspects of the project.
The next step for ALPHA is to start performing measurements on bottled antihydrogen, and this is due to get underway later this year.
The first step is to illuminate the trapped anti-atoms with microwaves to determine if they absorb exactly the same frequencies (or energies) as their matter twins.
"I've always liked hydrogen atoms," Walter Hardy of the University of British Columbia, a leading expert in atomic hydrogen studies, said.
"It's ironic that we are now trying to measure the same properties of antihydrogen that I measured many years ago on regular hydrogen.
"It is a crucial comparison, though, and will tell us if we truly understand the relationship between matter and antimatter," he stated.
The paper has been published online by the journal Nature Physics.
