LHC Scientists Create and Capture Antimatter

Velcroman1 writes "Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider have created antimatter in the form of antihydrogen, demonstrating how it's possible to capture and release it. The development could help researchers devise laboratory experiments to learn more about this strange substance, which mostly disappeared from the universe shortly after the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. Trapping any form of antimatter is difficult, because as soon as it meets normal matter — the stuff Earth and everything on it is made out of — the two annihilate each other in powerful explosions. 'We are getting close to the point at which we can do some classes of experiments on the properties of antihydrogen,' said Joel Fajans, a University of California, Berkeley professor of physics, and LBNL faculty scientist. 'Since no one has been able to make these types of measurements on antimatter atoms at all, it's a good start.'"

Comments

Re:Anti-matter behaves as expected, like matter

[Colonel Korn]

The core is negative/neutral mass and the orbit is positive mass. Naturally, anti-matter electrical conductors conduct positive particles rather than negative. The questions of behavior that need to be answered is what exactly causes i.e. electroconductivity. Reversing the charges, in theory, won't affect the behavior insomuch as you have X mobile particles and Y non-mobile particles setting up orbits that should be the same (the nature of electrical charge attraction doesn't change), so anti-copper should conduct positrons like copper conducts electrons etc. The reality... we don't know, of course.

It would be a big thing if someone created anti-copper AND it didn't behave exactly like copper when supplied with an anti-potential from an anti-battery.

Weird post unless you meant for it to be a joke that I didn't get.

We don't know that the assumption that anti-H behaves like H is true, and there's value in experimentally examining as many aspects of its behavior as we can. I'm not sure why you seem to indicate otherwise.

But then you go on to imply that electrical properties of anti-copper are the really interesting topic of anti-matter study. You seem to realize how incredibly difficult that would be. I don't understand why you declare one experiment to be uselessly redundant and the other a "big thing."

Re:RTFA

[Ihlosi]

They trap it for about 1/6 of a second, which isn't very long

In particle physics, that's still about half an eternity.