Antimatter News and Discussions
Posted: Wed Mar 22, 2023 3:11 pm
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Here is an interesting video regarding such an experiment:wjfox wrote: ↑Wed Sep 27, 2023 5:59 pm Antimatter falls down, not up: CERN experiment confirms theory
Observing this simple phenomenon had eluded physicists for decades.
27 September 2023
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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586- ... 1695831577
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-683494483 hours ago
It's extremely rare and usually exists for just 142 billionths of a second.
Positronium can generate huge amounts of energy. It can shed light on 'antimatter' which existed at the beginning of the Universe, and studying it could revolutionise physics, cancer treatment, and maybe even space travel.
But until now the elusive substance has been almost impossible to analyse because its atoms move around so much.
Now scientists have a workaround - freezing it with lasers.
"Physicists are in love with positronium," said Dr Ruggero Caravita, who led the research at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern), near Geneva. "It is the perfect atom to do experiments with antimatter."
Antimatter might sound like something out of science fiction, but at the CERN Antiproton Decelerator (AD), scientists produce and trap antiprotons every day. The BASE experiment can even contain them for more than a year—an impressive feat considering that antimatter and matter annihilate upon contact.
The CERN AD hall is the only place in the world where scientists are able to store and study antiprotons. But this is something that scientists working on the BASE experiment hope to change one day with their subproject BASE-STEP: an apparatus designed to store and transport antimatter.
Most recently, the team of scientists and engineers took an important step towards this goal by transporting a cloud of 70 protons in a truck across CERN's main site.
"If you can do it with protons, it will also work with antiprotons," said Christian Smorra, the leader of BASE-STEP. "The only difference is that you need a much better vacuum chamber for the antiprotons."

