Hey. Remember Star Trek? Remember how that show introduced us all the concept of warp engines that were powered by antimatter? We just got closer to making that a reality.
“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 the adjacent Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a member of the ALPHA (Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus) experiment at CERN.
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 annihilate with normal matter, which creates a flash of light.
Source: Livescience.com / Image source: elfwood.com
