Physicists at CERN have been jumping with joy this month as they discovered how to measure the light emitted by an antimatter atom, for the first time ever. This is a fantastic breakthrough for the team as they reveal that antihydrogen is a mirror image of hydrogen and may be used to answer one of physics biggest mysteries – why does the universe have much more regular matter than antimatter?
The way it goes in physics is that for every particle of regular matter that exists, there’s also an antiparticle and for every negatively charged electron there’s a positively charged positron. This also means that for each hydrogen atom that exists there’s an antihydrogen atom also. The antihydrogen atom consists of an antielectron that’s bound to an antiproton. When an antiparticle meets a regular particle, they cancel each other out and release light energy as a result.
The breakthrough comes as scientists can now measure this light given off and use these measurements to analyze further. This is a world first in being able to control an antihydrogen atom steady enough to measure it and then compare is to its regular hydrogen counterpart. Because nature will immediately cancel out any antihydrogen, it’s impossible to find any within nature. So, scientists create their own.
This type of research has been going on for years and the ALPHA team alone has dedicated more than two decades of work to it. And finally, they have been rewarded for their hard work and have managed to create a technique that allows them to produce around 25,000 antihydrogen atoms in just 15 minutes. Out of the 25,000 they are only able to capture around 14 of them, but that’s still an improvement in the 1.2 that previous methods achieved.
In testing the amount of light that’s released from the particles they found that during the same test the antihydrogen atom emitted the same light spectrum to that of regular hydrogen atoms. The researchers are overjoyed with the results that they have received from the testing and that this confirms the idea of Einstein’s special relativity for yet another day.
Penning trap; is a device for the storage of charged particles using a homogeneous axial magnetic field and an inhomogeneous quadrupole electric field. This kind of trap is particularly well suited to precision measurements of properties of ions and stable subatomic particles. Geonium atoms have been created and studied this way, to measure the electron magnetic moment. Via Wikipedia.
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