IN AND OUT: This artist's conception depicts the confined path of an antimatter atom inside the ALPHA trap in light blue. The white tracks depict outflying particles that originate from a matter-antimatter annihilation when the antiatom is released from its trap.
Image: ALPHA/CERN
-
Gravity's Engines
We’ve long understood black holes to be the points at which the universe as we know it comes to an end. Often billions of times more massive than the Sun, they...
Read More »
Maybe antimatter is finally ready for its close-up. A team of physicists has succeeded in producing rudimentary atoms of antimatter and holding on to them for several minutes, an advance that holds hope for detailed comparisons of how ordinary atoms of matter compare with their exotic antimatter counterparts.
The researchers, from the ALPHA antimatter experiment at CERN, the European laboratory for particle physics, reported last year the first trapping of antihydrogen, the simplest antimatter atom. But the antihydrogen had at that time been confined for less than two tenths of a second. That interval has now been extended by a factor of more than 5,000. In a study published online June 5 in Nature Physics, the ALPHA group reports having confined antihydrogen for 16 minutes and 40 seconds. The more relevant number for physicists, who often deal in powers of 10, is 1,000 seconds. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
The subatomic particles of everyday matter—protons, neutrons and electrons—have antimatter cousins; when matter meets antimatter the two annihilate in a burst of energy. And just as the neutral hydrogen atom is made of a single proton bound to an electron, an atom of antihydrogen comprises an antiproton and a positron, the antimatter counterparts, respectively.
But the mutual annihilation between those particles and their ubiquitous matter counterparts makes it challenging to hang on to antimatter for very long, and even more challenging to produce and confine bound atomic arrangements of multiple antiparticles. Neutral anti-atoms such as antihydrogen are especially tricky to confine because they are impervious to electric fields, which can be used to steer charged antiparticles such as antiprotons. Experiments such as ALPHA instead use superconducting magnets to trap their quarry.
Cagey as anti-atoms are, physicists would like to pin them down and compare the properties of antihydrogen with hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Those comparisons might involve laser spectroscopy of the anti-atoms or physical tests of how antihydrogen "feels" the influence of gravity. Any discrepancies between hydrogen and antihydrogen might help explain why matter won out over antimatter in our observable universe. "If one could do that, that would be a huge advance in terms of understanding why we live in a world of matter," says Clifford Surko, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, who wrote a commentary for Nature Physics accompanying the new study. "There's got to be an asymmetry somewhere, so that's a long-term goal."
The lifetime of antihydrogen in the ALPHA trap is probably sufficient to begin those studies. "We think we're in a position to start measuring something," says ALPHA spokesperson Jeffrey Hangst of Aarhus University in Denmark. Initial studies will involve irradiating the anti-atoms with microwaves to try to engage them in a resonant interaction, flipping their spin like a compass needle swinging from north to south.
Critically, the confinement times achieved by ALPHA imply that the antihydrogen atoms have had time to decay into their lowest-energy, or ground, state. "This method of antihydrogen formation creates them in highly excited states," Surko says. "They're fragile, and for really high-precision measurements of antihydrogen you need them in the ground state."
Hangst says that the jump from trapping times measured in milliseconds to those measured in hundreds of seconds did not stem from any one major advance. But getting antihydrogen atoms to stick in the trap much more often was a big help in improving on last year's confinement experiment. It now takes fewer experimental runs to demonstrate that an antihydrogen atom has been trapped. "What was tricky here was not keeping them but trapping enough of them to do the experiment," he says. "The big technological step here is we're much better now at trapping them at all."
Still the efficiency of trapping is somewhat low—for each antiatom confined by the trap, thousands more from the same batch escape. And in 16 trapping experiments of 1,000 seconds each, only seven antihydrogen atoms were detected in total. (The researchers demonstrate the confinement of antihydrogen by quickly shutting down the superconducting magnets, turning the anti-atoms loose, and watching for matter–antimatter annihilations on the walls of the trap.)
A competing antimatter experiment at CERN, known as ATRAP, has been working toward producing larger numbers of antihydrogen atoms with lower kinetic energies, which would facilitate their trapping. But so far that effort has yet to bear fruit. "We think that it would be good to have more atoms than [the ALPHA rate of] fewer than one atom per trial," says Harvard University physicist Gerald Gabrielse, spokesperson for the ATRAP collaboration. "We would hope not to be publishing a paper that says we see 0.6 atom per trial, but 100 atoms per trial."
The ATRAP group, Gabrielse says, made the choice to increase the number of atoms in the trap rather than increasing the sensitivity of the instruments to detect small numbers of anti-atoms, as ALPHA has done. "Maybe we made the wrong one," he says of that decision. "Certainly we made the one that got less publicity." Nevertheless, Gabrielse says he is encouraged by his competitors' success. "I'm glad that they have demonstrated that you can trap antihydrogen atoms," he says. "I think it shows that if we have more atoms, we'll have time to do some things with them."
See what we're tweeting about
36 Comments
Add CommentPerhaps the most basic question about antimatter that has not yet been definitively determined is how it interacts gravitationally with other antimatter and with matter. While the overwhelming consensus is that there should be no different in the gravitational effects of matter and antimatter it has been difficult to establish - perhaps the persistence achieved here can enable it to be finally established.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhile high energy interactions of the relativistic jets of active galaxies with their interstellar mediums, along with the manifestation of virtual particles indicates that, in the conditions of the recent universe the production of antiparticles is just as likely as particles, the simplest solution to the prevalence of matter over antimatter is that the originating conditions of the universe favored the production of matter. This could have been a result of rotation, for example - analogous to the complementary rotation of protoplanetary disks and the orientation of planetary rotation and magnetic field polarity. The diminishment of this universal angular momentum in the current universe may simply allow the production of antimatter...
Darn it! You said exactly what I was going to say! :-)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe synergy between high energy physics and philosophy is one of the reasons I'm so interested in both, and yet believe God has a sense of humor.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCould it possibly be due to random chance? Why Good always triumphs over evil? (At least in old comic books and TV series).
So God throws in Dark Matter and Dark Energy, if they exist, just to keep the scientists guessing and the Sci-Fi writers in business.
Most observable properties of our known world have elegantly simple solutions to our questions.
And Robert A. Heinlein might say that all of the above is a semantic sum zero, but would he forgive my grammar?
-LOL
Philip R. Tripp
ROFL... The first step towards knowledge in the scientific process is hypothesis. What may seem far fetched or radical - like a round Earth - might cost your life and be proven correct.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is great! Hopefully these steps forward will lead to major levels of support for this work. There are "asymmetries", and with enough of this "stuff" they well come out of hiding along with a more refined view of everything!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisR. Carlson
Great Work! I hope increased levels of support allow these folks to keep rubbing those atoms around. We are now entering the exciting new realm of "science friction".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.amazon.com/Evidence-Things-Not-Seen-Orthodoxy/dp/B000SB5N4O
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@PTripp "Most observable properties of our known world have elegantly simple solutions to our questions" but it would appear that many of the simplest question have incredibly complex solutions which in turn lead us further into an endless quest for knowledge and understanding. For every answer we find, more questions arise, humanity's unquenchable curiosity is beautiful, is it not?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe synthesis of an small amount of antimatter opens the way to a new, high density energy storage procedure. Good news !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am not a scientist, but Murray Gel-Mann, Nobel Prize in 1969, in his book The Quark and the Jaguar wrote at page 179: antiparticles . . . move backwards in space and time. It is too fantastic perhaps, but I think it is perfectly normal that in our universe there is no antimatter, simply because antiparticles just at the Big Bang went backwards in space and time. And this perhaps is the mysterious dark matter!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps anti-matter is simply ordinary matter existing in another "parallel universe" in which case it would be bound by that universe's laws of physics? When appearing in our universe for a brief time before returning to its own, perhaps its behavior is unpredictable, based on the interaction of laws of physics existing in its native universe with laws of our universe?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswhere have you been working on this, in your backyard?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi would love to see the data and experimental design for this, as well as a published article in a peer reviewed journal
where have you been working on this, in your backyard?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi would love to see the data and experimental design for this, as well as a published article in a peer reviewed journal
i find it hard to believe that you can speak with such conviction and a lack of humility while speaking about something you seem to have made up yourself, yet somehow people with particle accelerators disagree?
Ordinary types of antimatter, corresponding to ordinary matter and identical except for charge inversion, would not satisfy the requirements for dark matter: massive particles that do not interact with light or matter (to the extent that they cannot be directly detected) except through gravitational effects.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTime reversal seems to be a highly esoteric subject (beyond my comprehension) applicable at quantum scales, in the determination of antiparticles' inverted charge, for example. It does not appear to be a factor in the observation of these hydrogen antiatoms at macro scales, for example. Applying the concept of time reversal directly to macro scales, one might expect antiparticles equaling the quantities of particles produced during the big bang to be found in some spacetime that preceded the big bang, but this does not seem to be the case.
It seems to me that even accomplished scientific geniuses are generally free to speculate in their books without serious criticism from their peers, since books are intended to appeal to a general audience and meet sales goals. I admit I don't read such books or novels - how does "The Quark and the Jaguar" end?
"how does "The Quark and the Jaguar" end?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe quark wins.
Kidding aside, it is an interesting read.
Gel-Mann did not invent the idea of antimatter as matter going back in time. It is a direct consequence of our understanding of QED, as can be displayed in Feynman diagrams (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feynman_diagram).
Whether or not antimatter is "really" matter going backwards in time, or if that is just consistent with our understanding and cannot be ruled out at this time, I can't tell you. As far as I know, no one can rule it out.
JT - What are your thoughts on this: When matter and antimatter destroy each other, what is left? Conservation of energy/matter says that they are still in some form, but what form? Could the destruction change them into dark energy? If so, that might easily explain the 'missing matter' that DE and DM are placeholders for.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm sure "The Quark and the Jaguar" is very interesting, and could enhance my understanding.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI can't do the math, but it seems to me that the idea that antiparticles proceed backwards in spacetime is an analytical convenience used to produce the inversion of standard particles' charge during the production of antiparticles. I don't know that its' been established to be a real physical event, but as I understand time inversion is proposed to only affect its components very briefly during the antiparticle's production - there is no subsequent propagation of antiparticles backwards in time. But I could be wrong...
It is very curious - thanks.
I try to look at things a simply as possible - perhaps that's all I'm capable of. I would expect the product of matter-antimatter annihilation to be essentially quantum 'vacuum energy'.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wouldn't guess that the annihilation would necessarily produce dark energy, but then I suspect that dark energy doesn't really exist as a distinct entity, that if the expansion of the universe really has begun to accelerate in the past few billion years it is because the very large scale configuration of increasingly localized matter in the expanded universe now diminishes the universal effect of gravitation's resistance to expansion. In other words, perhaps the localization of matter within the 'cosmic web' configuration allows the expansion of spacetime to affect larger areas of spacetime 'gaps' without gravitational resistance. At least, that's one thought.
You might have seen my comments about the perceived requirement for dark matter - if not please see:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=dama-dark-matter#comment-42
and
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=milky-way-should-have-much-more-com-11-05-09#comment-10
Regarding the 'standard model' of cosmology, I suspect that the proxy entities of dark matter and dark energy simply compensate for maladjusted or missing parameters... I think there's plenty of unknowns out there without inventing our own - thanks!
Protons and electrons are fine. Neutrons are not easy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have always wondered if there is any real difference between Neutrons and the anti-matter version. The difference between an electron and a positron, or a proton and an anti-proton appears to be mainly a question of charge. But, a neutron has no charge. All the experiments I have seen show that Neutron decay Always results in a Proton and an Electron. the half life of an isolated Neutron is about 12 minutes. Would an anti-neutron decay into an Anti-Proton and a Positron? or does the lack of charge imply that a neutron is it's own anti-particle?
The only way to tell is to run the experiment. Could a stream of neutrons/anti-neutrons, produced by an accelerator be beamed into a block of say graphite, with instruments around it to look for the decay products? it would be interesting to look for asymmetry. It may not need a universal asymmetry to explain the prevalence of matter. It would open a whole new window on the Universe too.
when matter and anti-matter meet, there is an annihilation. The result is a high energy photon that has the energy of both particles by E=MC^2. Matter-Energy is the same after the reaction as before, so the conservation law is maintained. There is nothing that says that the same number of particles must be there.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe reverse process is what the accelerator is doing to create equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Thus, charge as well as energy is conserved. There is a theory that the net charge of the Universe is very close to zero, if not exactly zero. I know of no way to verify this though.
But, the matter/antimatter annihilation events DO conserve everything we know to measure. (Positive 1 plus negative one add up to zero) This was experimentally verified in the 1950's based on anti-protons and positrons generated by cosmic rays.
You're in too deep for me, but antineutrons' electric charge, spin and mass are all identical to neutrons. However, since they're composed of antiquarks rather than quarks, their color charge is -1 instead of 0. I'll stop there, but to find out more you could see:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baryon_number
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiparticle states:
"Although particles and their antiparticles have opposite charges, electrically neutral particles need not be identical to their antiparticles. The neutron, for example, is made out of quarks, the antineutron from antiquarks, and they are distinguishable from one another because neutrons and antineutrons annihilate each other upon contact. However, other neutral particles are their own antiparticles, such as photons, the hypothetical gravitons, and some WIMPs. These are called Majorana particles and can annihilate with themselves."
I don't follow how photons can be "their own antiparticles" and "can annihilate with themselves."
Curious! I wonder if this has been confirmed?
Very good and much more complete explanation - thanks for the correction.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou talk about spacetime that preceded the big bang and so now it is not here. I see that you are thinking of time as a road where we are travelling just in only one direction. But I don’t think time is like that, in my fantasy at least. In the book of Prof. Kip S. Thorne "Black Holes and Time Warps: Einstein’s outrageous Legacy" edited by Papermac in 1994 you can find everything about Wormholes and Time Machines starting at page 483. Space-time is like an ocean and if you can find the right way you can travel on it through . . . in theory at least!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you are interested, The Quark and the Jaguar by Gel-Mann was published in 1995 by Abacus. Since you seem interested I tell you the end: "The conservation of nature, safeguarding as much biological diversity as possible, is urgently required. "
I prefer simple solutions that I can comprehend, so I don't think that wormholes, even if they do exist, can ever be employed by humanity for directed time travel. I think we are more like flotsam in a sea of spacetime.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCertainly I empathize with Gel-Mann on the importance of nature, but I'm afraid that it's too late for humanity. Now having quadrupled the largest population ever assembled in little more than 100 years, only our own catastrophic failure can save the biosphere. Overpopulation is the 6.9 billion pound gorilla in the room that nobody notices.
In a universe where either anti-matter or matter had to dominate, in all likelihood whichever won, we would have called it 'matter'.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell, it's been a while, but when I took Relativistic Quantum Dynamics in College, There had never been an example of an isolated Quark. I believe that is still the case, consequently, Quarks, while a useful way of looking at sub-atomic particles are not a proven entity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was just saying that an experiment that created equal numbers of particles and antiparticles, which is what is happening over there in Europe, if it did create Neutrons, would provide a very useful check on the theory. If Murry Gell-Mann was correct with the quark theory, then a neutron should annihilate when it meets an Anti-Neutron, or when the Anti-neutron decays, after a few minutes, it should decay into a positron and an anti-neutron. But, if the major difference is just in the charge of the particle, then the Anti-neutron would decay into a Proton and an Electron. We can control the speed and somewhat the direction of Neutrons with a graphite moderator, and we know how to tell the difference between a Neutron decay, and an annihilation event. The Gamma rays produced are quite different.
I would just like to see it as a confirmation.
BTW, I first heard of the Quark Theory in a lecture given by Dr Gell Mann at my University. After 40 years, it would be nice to have some proof.
Still no single quark has been isolated. I agree that the apparent quarks could represent internally oscillating characteristics of nucleons. The only indication I find of any experimental evidence that quarks are discrete fundamental particles is in a weak wikipedia entry describing internally probing protons and neutrons with electron streams & observing their scattering patterns. There's very little to this, though, and I think some localized properties within protons & neurons could also account for those supposed results:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_inelastic_scattering
It seems that others have found some proof or belief in quarks as it seems they are commonly considered to exist as discrete particles. I'll avoid mentioning dark matter here...
Sorry I'm fading out on particle decays, still puzzling while neutrons and anti-neutrons with identical mass, spin & charge would annihilate...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Antihydrogen or Positrons are not effected by gravity and are true antigravity particles".
The learned ability to stop the mutual annihilation between matter and antimatter particles while collecting and seperating them will be challenging but the reward could very well could be a Antigravity solution.
Positrons which naturally flow up electromagnetic field away from graitational forces move as if attracted magneticly in + - . Antihydrogen's are not bound by gravity's confines and may act like a stabilizer inside atoms contributing to orbital paths and spin of protons within atoms.
Anti-atoms such as antihydrogen are created in nature during high altitude thunderstorms by lighting, the Positrons created flow up wards along the Earth's magnetic field and out into space.
Ronald Nussbeck
Subatomic particles of matter-protons, neutrons and electrons all have antimatter relatives and so does gravity. Gravity within the atom has a relative, anti-gravity contained within the Positron antimatter.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe hydrogen atom is made of a single proton bound to an electron by gravity and anti-gravity, an atom of antihydrogen comprises an antiproton and a positron, the antimatter counterparts, respectively.
Science has over looked the anti-gravity effect that binds the particles together, gravity has been a mystery but once the equation is solved the answer will be a moment of I understand now.
Ronald Nussbeck
Excellent job for trapping them that long...I hope they keep pursuing....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDo you have the same shout out praise for God who made this possible, who shows even those who hate him wonders all day long, who rarely or never thank him? Do you show the same shout out joyous praise when someone finds new evidence to put onto the mountain of evidence for creation and against molecules-to-man-evolution? http://eternian.wordpress.com - where atheists and anti-Christians are regularly shown to be silly idiots.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat synergy? No other synergy between anything else interests you? Like ironic coincidences to no end and Christianity? You seem to be narrow-visioned.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes perhaps, perhaps. Hold on... Jeeves, bring me my cup of tea. Ok where was I, it seems you forgot to give praise to Darwin somewhere in your comment, this verges on blasphemy in the continuing holy scriptures of Scientific American Mainstreamism. Oh I see this magazine won some dripping poop-looking award, very appropriate. - eternian.wordpress.com
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI developed (1999, 2005, 2012) periodical hyperspatial matter/antimatter concept, predicting antigravity = repulsion between matter and antimatter. My periodical (matter/antimatter) waveguided 4D-Multiverse is quite realistic: it looks as a 4D-mica-crystal built of periodical 3D-waveguides/3D-antiwaveguides and simultaneously elexplains: (see, please the e-Journal published paper in Berlin (Humboldt Univ. http://www2.hu-berlin.de/leibniz-sozietaet/journal/archive/13_12/01_gribov.pdf )
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(1) the interconnected nature of Dark Energy (DE) and Dark Matter (DM) & the flatness of our Universe/Multiverse & the accelerating expansion & the bubble large-scale structure, with the estimated theoretical ratio DE/(DM + Ordinary Matter) ~74%/26%, that is very near to the recently done measurements. The DE&DM, etc data work as evidences for it);
(2) realizes massive-quantized ? elementary, hyper-periodical fermions / antifermions, with the string-like properties without singularities; the GR-like black holes also free of singularities;
(3) predicts antigravity in the future antihydrogen (or positronium) -gravity test (preparing in CERN and in the Mills lab -US);
(4) explains the Cooper-like (e-/e+) composite-ghost nature of the total vacuum supersymmetry (SUSY), providing zero (superfluid vacuum) energy density and its "impossible" but necessary weightlessness;
(5) predicts natural absence of the hypothetical elementary SUSY sparticles (never detected at CERN);
(6) predicts absence of the "elusive" Higgs bosons, naturally excluded by the holistic waveguided rest-mass creation mechanism (e.g. at CERN in the LEP experiments). (The so predicted negative LEP data will be also revolutionary). If the future CERN-tests will confirm the mentioned above predictions, it will be experimentally an OPEN DOOR to the periodical Multiverse discovery, that means
(7) existence of plenty (physically equal, gravitationally interconnected) parallel, dark Universes, with enormous density of similar hyper-civilizations (placed proximally near 10 -100 light minutes in a R4-distance around via Milky Way galaxy)!
Brilliant! Your theory is for the most part correct, periodical hyper spatial matter/antimatter concept, predicting antigravity = repulsion between matter and antimatter. As I have written in White Papers and post here and in other articles that support your narrative but as with all geniuses you are several years ahead of most scientists. Thanks for your contribution.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRonald Nussbeck
Dear Ronald,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthank you for the comment, could you send me yours kontact email (my is igribov@aol.com)
Best regards, Iourii Gribov