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Cern Mass Produces Anti-Hydrogen
Izeickl writes "The BBC is reporting Here about scientists in the Cern particle accelerator in Geneva, Switzerland have mass produced over 50,000 atoms allowing them to test basic Physics using them, however "Harvard physicist Gerald Gabrielse said: "Our long experience with these very difficult experiments warns that antihydrogen may not have really been produced.""
From the horses mouth :-) Athena, the guys who did it
Nature.com article(PDF)
home page of the experiment
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There's a simple and to-the-point description of Antihydrogen at the Wikipedia.
Bizarrely, the person responsible for the original submission is typing this sentence right now. Thankfully, brighter people have improved upon it somewhat since then... :)
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You say they make very ffew antiprotons from all that power, and I guess that in human terms that is correct. However, I'm looking at live readouts at the Tevatron status, and there are currently 48.38*10^10 anti-protons in the antiproton storage ring you speak of, and another 246.92*10^9 in the Tevatron itself.
Just you give you a sense of how much antimatter is produced. Cern didn't produce much antimattter at all with these 50,000 atoms. Fermilab doesn't produce any antiatoms because they have no use for them. Only negative antiprotons (pbars) are of any use.
Don't Bogart the fish sticks
In comparing the quantities, you should keep in mind that the storage rings you are talking about have very "hot" (high kinetic energy) antiprotons.
The real achievement is to cool the antiprotons down to about 15 K, and combining them with positrons. The yield of that whole process is very low. I.e., you need large quantities of hot antiprotons to produce 50k atoms of "cold" antihydrogen.
This link describes how the ATRAP collaboration cools the ingredients of Antihydrogen.