Antimatter does not occur naturally, except for single particles produced in nuclear or cosmic ray interactions. Therefore, the only way to obtain it is to produce it. At CERN, we have a dedicated facility for this purpose: the Antimatter Factory. When operating, it delivers approximately 400 million antiprotons per hour to experiments studying antimatter, of which the experiments are able to ...
In a paper published today in Nature Communications, researchers at the ALPHA experiment at CERN’s Antimatter Factory report a new technique that allows them to produce over 15 000 antihydrogen atoms – the simplest form of atomic antimatter – in a matter of hours. “These numbers would have been considered science fiction 10 years ago,” said Jeffrey Hangst, spokesperson for the ALPHA ...
In a breakthrough for antimatter research, the BASE collaboration at CERN has kept an antiproton – the antimatter counterpart of a proton – oscillating smoothly between two different quantum states for almost a minute while trapped. The achievement, reported in a paper published today in the journal Nature, marks the first demonstration of an antimatter quantum bit, or qubit, and paves ...
Isaac Newton's historic work on gravity was apparently inspired by watching an apple fall to the ground from a tree. But what about an “anti-apple” made of antimatter, would it fall in the same way if it existed? According to Albert Einstein’s much-tested theory of general relativity, the modern theory of gravity, antimatter and matter should fall to Earth in the same way. But do they ...
The BASE collaboration at CERN has bagged more than one first in antimatter research. For example, it made the first ever more precise measurement for antimatter than for matter, it kept antimatter stored for a record time of more than a year, and it conducted the first laboratory-based search for an interaction between antimatter and a candidate particle for dark matter called the axion. Now ...