Mirror image: a peek at antimatter universe

[hitchcockgreen]

Bob Weber, The Canadian Press
A tiny crack in the door to an alternate universe has been wedged open a bit wider.

Canadian and international scientists have announced a major breakthrough in their ability to capture and store minuscule particles of antimatter, the mysterious substance described as a mirror image of everyday reality. It lies at the heart of the most fundamental questions in physics.

"I call this a game-changer," said Makoto Fujiwara, a University of Calgary scientist and the lead author of a paper published in the journal Nature Physics.

"The antimatter world is some sort of mirror world," he said.

"We're really peeking. There's so many things were thought of as science fiction that we can seriously consider scientifically studying them. We're really excited about this."

Fujiwara and 40 other physicists from eight countries working at the Switzerland-based European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, say they have been able to hold on to atoms of antihydrogen - the antimatter counterpart to regular hydrogen - and do so for nearly 6,000 times longer than the previous record.

The team, which includes researchers from five Canadian universities and research institutions, has also been able to catch eight times as much antihydrogen as before.

"It will really provide us with an opportunity to measure different properties of antimatter very precisely," Fujiwara said. "You can think of a lot of studies that were not even imaginable before."

Physicists believe that when the universe was created about 14 billion years ago, as postulated in the big bang theory, matter and antimatter were created in equal amounts. But the universe now contains almost no trace of antimatter and scientists want to know what happened to it all.

"It's one of the fundamental questions of physics and astronomy: what happened to antimatter?" Fujiwara said.

Scientists at CERN, one of the world's largest and best-equipped facilities for physics research, were first able to create antimatter in 2002 by smacking atomic particles together at near light speeds. But matter and antimatter annihilate each other in a burst of energy when they come in contact, so researchers couldn't keep the antimatter around.

Last November, a "magnetic bottle" without physical walls enabled them to create and store antimatter for the first time - 38 atoms of antihydrogen for about 0.17 seconds.

Now, technical improvements and refinements have allowed them to catch 308 atoms and store them for more than 16 minutes. Fujiwara said scientists may be able to stretch that out even longer.

The added time gives researchers a much greater ability to study the characteristics of antimatter - things as basic as its colour and how it reacts to gravity. "We don't know if antimatter falls down or falls up."

As well, normal hydrogen is electrically balanced. That means the negative charge of the electron equals the positive charge of the proton. No one knows if the same applies to antihydrogen.

"It opens the way to studying these kinds of properties of antimatter," Fujiwara said. "For us, that's the really exciting part."

Scientists can now begin to recap the entire history of 20th-century physics, only this time from the antimatter side, he suggested.

[Dx.]

Funny how cern comes up with this after a guy wrote a book explaining how gravity works and covered antimatter.

[Ded10c]

That seems quite a bit odd to me. There's no suggestion anywhere that I can see that there's an antimatter universe - just a lack of antimatter where we are.

s for the bit at the end, that's just confusing. We've known about positrons for a long time now, and the only difference between them and electrons is their quark composition, which means they have an opposing charge. They still have positive mass, so they still fall down. For something to "fall" upwards, it would need to have negative mass.

And it should also still react with light in the same way.

[hitchcockgreen]

Funny how cern comes up with this after a guy wrote a book explaining how gravity works and covered antimatter.

Lots of guys wrote books about gravity and antimatter.

The point of the article, despite the author's obvious lack of scientific knowledge, is that antimatter in the form of antihydrogen can be captured and maintained for an extraordinary amount of time now, as opposed to just recently.

The implications are that rather than just rely on theory to describe the properties of antimatter, they can now be observed directly.

That seems quite a bit odd to me. There's no suggestion anywhere that I can see that there's an antimatter universe - just a lack of antimatter where we are.

They're not literally saying there is a mirror antimatter universe. The scientist is saying that being able to study/see antimatter is like looking at a mirror universe.

for the bit at the end, that's just confusing. We've known about positrons for a long time now, and the only difference between them and electrons is their quark composition,

Yes. And as I said above, although the article is poorly written, it did strike me as a fascinating bit of news. I'll be trawling scientific news sources for better coverage.

[Dx.]

Lots of guys wrote books about gravity and antimatter.

Sure they talked about what they didn't understand, this guy fully explains it and corrects the current scientific model.

[hitchcockgreen]

Post the title and author!

[Dx.]

[Ded10c]

That seems quite a bit odd to me. There's no suggestion anywhere that I can see that there's an antimatter universe - just a lack of antimatter where we are.

They're not literally saying there is a mirror antimatter universe. The scientist is saying that being able to study/see antimatter is like looking at a mirror universe.

Ah, I see. Thread title confused me.

[hitchcockgreen]

yeah. poorly written article. Used the actual article title, which is rather misleading.

[Blunt Force Trauma]

Another thing that comes along with these articles and books is incorporating antimatter as an energy source. It then runs up against the scale barrier.

There's no reason antimatter can't be "bottled" for use. The problem is the amount of energy needed to produce and then store it. The efficiency ratio is many millions to one. As it is now, it would take several large CERN-size colliders working for years to power a motorcycle a few minutes.

But who knows, someday there may be a breakthrough to produce and store it to make it viable for some extreme applications such as space travel.

[hitchcockgreen]

That's why I find it an interesting breakthrough. Being able to maintain anti-matter for an extended period of time means we'll be able to study it properly.