What can you do in 17 minutes?
11 May 2011 by Evoluted New Media
It might not seem very long, but 17 minutes is a long time for researchers on the ALPHA project at CERN who have managed to trap antihydrogen for a lengthy 1000 seconds – four orders of magnitude higher than has ever been achieved before.
It might not seem very long, but 17 minutes is a long time for researchers on the ALPHA project at CERN who have managed to trap antihydrogen for a lengthy 1000 seconds – four orders of magnitude higher than has ever been achieved before.
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Researchers on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus – ALPHA – cooled the antiprotons that when combined with positrons, are used to make the antihydrogen. This reduced the energy in the resulting matter, and allowed more of it to be confined in a magnetic trap and held there for a period of time.
In total, they trapped 309 antihydrogen atoms – up from the previous best of just 38 – meaning the team is learning to capture more of them and to hold onto them longer before collisions with trace gases annihilates them or escape the magnetic field. Their calculations indicate most of the trapped anti-atoms reached the ground state.
The physicists hope to answer questions about the behaviour of antihydrogen, like whether it occupies the same energy level as hydrogen, or whether it falls up! They plan to cool a small bunch of antihydrogen in such a way as to allow them to watch as it either rises or falls due to gravity.
Atoms made of a particle and an antiparticle are unstable, surviving less that a microsecond – but antihydrogen is believed to be made up of entirely antiparticles and therefore stable. This longevity holds the promise of precision studies of matter-anti-matter symmetry.
