Anti matter finally captured

[GreenKirby]

Berkeley physicists seeking to pierce a mystery as old as the universe joined an international team of scientists Wednesday to report they have trapped and stored a few dozen atoms of antimatter - the stuff that annihilates ordinary matter in a single explosive flash of energy.

It's a real-life version of the immortal "Star Trek" fantasy, where antimatter is crucial to speed the Starship Enterprise through the galaxy at warp drive, faster than the speed of light.

And although there's no warp drive in high-energy physics, the announcement marks a major achievement: For the first time, the scientists have stored 38 atoms of the antimatter called antihydrogen for a tiny fraction of a second.

But even greater success is near, said Joel Fajans, a physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, because the international group will soon be gathering much larger numbers of the antimatter atoms and storing them much longer - long enough for experiments that will seek to explain many of the most fundamental properties of the Big Bang that began the universe.

Fajans and Jonathan Wurtele, also a physics professor at UC Berkeley, joined with other Berkeley colleagues to conceive and design the sophisticated magnetic trap that successfully kept atoms of antimatter from destroying themselves the instant they hit the ordinary matter of the containers where they were made.

Fajans was in Geneva on Wednesday at a celebration of the achievement, and in a telephone interview he explained how cosmologists have long reasoned that the very first instant of the Big Bang must have produced equal amounts of antimatter and the ordinary matter that became all the galaxies, stars and planets.

"But the antimatter seems to have disappeared," Fajans said, "and no one knows why. It's one of the fundamental mysteries of the Big Bang, and now that we know how to store it, we'll soon have enough atoms of antimatter to hold in our hands long enough to study questions like how it behaves in real-world gravity, what its fundamental role was in the evolution of the universe and how it behaves when we excite it with laser beams."

Matter and antimatter are identical in form but opposite in their electric charge. Ordinary hydrogen, the simplest element, is made of only two subatomic particles: a positively charged proton and a negatively charged electron orbiting around the proton like a planet around a star. Antihydrogen, thus, is made of an antiproton and an antielectron, now called a positron.

Scientists succeeded in making the first atoms of antihydrogen 15 years ago, and experiments at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva, have since produced large quantities of them.

But keeping them from annihilating themselves was impossible until the Berkeley group tested the "octupole" magnetic trap that holds them in a powerful magnetic field at temperatures more than 400 degrees below zero. The Brookhaven National Laboratory fabricated the trap.

The Berkeley scientists are members of a physics team at CERN called the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus, or ALPHA. Their report, by 42 scientists from eight nations, is published today in the online version of the journal Nature.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/11/17/MN7K1GDIMN.DTL

 

[Luigitoilet]

This is cool.

well, I think so at least. I really don't know what it means at all, lol.

 

[Claire Diviner]

Wow! So science has finally lept over yet another obstacle. I've always been fascinated with science, including cosmology. One of my biggest interests was in dark matter and antimatter. Now that they have the technology to capture it (albeit briefly), they can now perfect the capture technology to be able to store it long enough to understand how it works. I'm so hyped now! Thanks for the thread, GreenKirby, you've just made my (and possibly every other astro nut on SWF) day! X3

 

[Jim Morrison]

...400 degrees below zero?

 

[Jonkku]

Man, Guus. I was gonna point out that absolute zero is -273.15 so they and their "-400" are just dumb, but I guess I'm too slow.

 

[Silent Beast]

Man, Guus. I was gonna point out that absolute zero is -273.15 so they and their "-400" are just dumb, but I guess I'm too slow.

-273.15 degrees C = -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit.

 

[Jim Morrison]

Hahahahaha, America. Not making sense since 1776.

 

[MikeKirby]

Once we harness this power. nuclear warheads will be the end of us... ._.

 

[Luigitoilet]

Once we harness this power. nuclear warheads will be the end of us... ._.

Seriously?

Antimatter has nothing to do with nuclear arms.

I'm pretty sure it would take billions of years to harvest enough energy from antimatter to blow up just a mailbox.

 

[Jim Morrison]

With current technologies, but everything we know now will be obsolete in 50 years.

Lol, 20 years ago we barely had cellphones and now we're capturing anti-matter.

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

...Hasn't anyone working on this project seen/read/heard of "Angels and Demons"? I mean, it's a stunning breakthrough, but **** if it's not going to set off a few alarm bells.

 

[T.testLP]

Wait, how do they store them if antimatter explodes when contacting matter? There is no possible container!

 

[Fuelbi]

...Hasn't anyone working on this project seen/read/heard of "Angels and Demons"? I mean, it's a stunning breakthrough, but **** if it's not going to set off a few alarm bells.

Holy crap, that's the first thing I thought when I saw this thread.

Somebody, guard the Vatican! Who knows what yahoo will attempt to blow it up this time

 

[Budget Player Cadet_]

Wait, how do they store them if antimatter explodes when contacting matter? There is no possible container!

Some form of container with a perfect vacuum, electromagnets to keep it centered.

 

[overgamer]

Wait, how do they store them if antimatter explodes when contacting matter? There is no possible container!

container is a magnetic field. Apparently something like that.

 

[Fuelbi]

I thought they kept them in an airtight container with magnets to keep the antimatter afloat so it doesn't touch the actual sphere itself.

 

[Grandeza]

I wish I knew what this meant or what the implications of this are. But I don't. Back to living in ignorance for me :]

 

[deepseadiva]

...Hasn't anyone working on this project seen/read/heard of "Angels and Demons"? I mean, it's a stunning breakthrough, but **** if it's not going to set off a few alarm bells.

I was reminded immediately.

That book is craaazy.

 

[Deleted member]

Some people are way overreacting to this.
first of all, as the article clearly states, they have been doing this for 15 years now, they only managed to keep a couple more in the same place.
second, we will never ever, see any antimatter drives or even just Angels & Demons type of explosives because mankind wouldn't for their entire lifetime be able to generate enough antimatter particles.

This is one of those typical pure-scientific (AKA barely any to no applications in real life) results that sounds all cool and awesome to the general public because the subject itself is somewhat clouded in mystery/hard to explain.
Thank you sci-fi writers I guess.

 

[deepseadiva]

they have been doing this for 15 years now, they only keep antimatter explosives because mankind awesome mystery

SO YOU MEAN WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE???
omgomgomg

 

[Deleted member]

as much as I appreciate the irony, no. no we're not all gonna die.

 

[theeboredone]

It would be great to see antimatter eventually used as an energy source. It's quite potent, but it's definitely not gonna happen in my lifetime. It could be a functional alternative source (if we find a cheap way to produce it LOL). On the other hand...hope nothing goes wrong and this **** ends up destroying the world.

 

[Luigitoilet]

Some people are way overreacting to this.
first of all, as the article clearly states, they have been doing this for 15 years now, they only managed to keep a couple more in the same place.
second, we will never ever, see any antimatter drives or even just Angels & Demons type of explosives because mankind wouldn't for their entire lifetime be able to generate enough antimatter particles.

This is one of those typical pure-scientific (AKA barely any to no applications in real life) results that sounds all cool and awesome to the general public because the subject itself is somewhat clouded in mystery/hard to explain.
Thank you sci-fi writers I guess.

Any advancement like this is huge, regardless if it can be applicable to common living or not. I hate when people put a damper on progress, no matter how small it is.

 

[Deleted member]

If anything I was trying to damper reaction's like the one made by BPC_

 

[Jonas]

...Hasn't anyone working on this project seen/read/heard of "Angels and Demons"? I mean, it's a stunning breakthrough, but **** if it's not going to set off a few alarm bells.

To make enough antimatter to blow up the Vatican, they need enough ENERGY to blow up the Vatican. That's quite an electrical bill. Enriched uranium is much more dangerous to store because it's easier to make buttloads of it.