The ALPHA experiment at CERN has made an important step toward the investigation of the difference between matter and antimatter: it has successfully produced and trapped atoms of antihydrogen. The collaboration, which consists of an international team of scientists from CERN, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the University of California – Berkeley, described their results in a paper published in Nature on November 17.
In the past, scientists have been successful at producing antihydrogen atoms, but could never pin down an effective method of trapping them for long enough to study them closely. Doing so would help them figure out why antimatter has apparently disappeared, despite the logical assumption that matter and antimatter would behave symmetrically. Antihydrogen atoms have a short life expectancy, and the only way to extend this is to employ strong magnetic fields. Researchers with the ALPHA experiment were able to trap 38 atoms for about a tenth of a second.
“Our report in Nature describes ALPHA’s first successes at trapping antihydrogen atoms, but we’re constanly improving the number and length of time we can hold onto them” said Joel Fajans, an ALPHA team member and scientist at Berkeley Lab. “We’re getting close to the point where we can do some classes of experiments on antimatter atoms. The first attempts will be crude, but no one has ever done anything like them before.”
