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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.'"
... for destroying the world in 2012.
If I reply, will our comments annihilate each other?
IANAP.. but..
I think the temporary capture of antiprotons and antielectrons has been achieved before, since it is relatively easy. It is the significant-duration capture of antihydrogen (i.e. antiproton + antielectron, forming an electrically neutral 'anti-atom') which is new ( ? ). Please correct, and scold, me if I am wrong.
..then does that mean it doesn't matter? :-)
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Now if they could only create antiidiot we could release it and take care of most of the worlds problems.
This would have been a better joke if you said "last get" instead.
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.
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Naw, the real question is, "Does it antimatter?"
ALPHA project is NOT a part of LHC. It is one of many other project at CERN that does not have much to do with LHC.
Note that production and capture of antihydrogen is not new. There's been prior work trying to use it to test for possible CPT violations. See for example hussle.harvard.edu/~atrap/Papers/2010/AntihydrogenPhysicsToday.pdf, http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005APS..DPPFP1058V and http://www.physics.harvard.edu/Thesespdfs/speck.pdf.
Antiprotons are relatively low-energy phenomena, being produced at 1 GeV. The LHC is a HIGH-energy facility, using energies 7000 times higher. Using the LHC to make antiprotons would be ridiculous overkill and counter-productive, since the ALPHA experiment needs antihydrogen at rest. Not every experiment at CERN uses the LHC. In this case, the cool bit of machinery is the Antiproton Decelerator (AD) and ALPHA's magnetic trapping system.
If they really created antihydrogen, they should prove it by taking a photo.
We'll have to be extra cautious that they don't just take a photo of regular hydrogen and apply a negative filter to the image.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
Stopped reading after the first sentence...
Scientists working on the big bang machine in Geneva have done the seemingly impossible: create, capture and release antimatter.
The "machine" in question does have a name, you know?
BBC News also has coverage,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11773791
I'm not trying to rag on Fox News here, but why link them and not CERN's press release page?
Clicky
No sig for you!!
Read "Worlds-Antiworlds: Antimatter in Cosmology" (1966) by Hannes Alfvén. Its the original discussion of this topic.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
First, most of the energy released in matter-antimatter annihilation is carried away by neutrinos.
Secondly...CERN covered this on one occasion:
The inefficiency of antimatter production is enormous: you get only a tenth of a billion (10-10) of the invested energy back. If we could assemble all the antimatter we've ever made at CERN and annihilate it with matter, we would have enough energy to light a single electric light bulb for a few minutes. ...
Can we make antimatter bombs?
No. It would take billions of years to produce enough antimatter for a bomb having the same destructiveness as ‘typical’ hydrogen bombs, of which there exist more than ten thousand already.
Sociological note: scientists realized that the atom bomb was a real possibility many years before one was actually built and exploded, and then the public was totally surprised and amazed. On the other hand, the public somehow anticipates the antimatter bomb, but we have known for a long time that it cannot be realized in practice.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Wait, wut? Are you try to say, 'If man had been meant to mess with anti-matter, GOD would have given us anti-matter containment systems built into our hands!"? :)
check out the Mp3 Garbler I built!
LHC Scientists Create and Capture Antimatter
PETAM (People for the Ethical Treatment of Antimatter) are not going to be pleased with this. Especially the bits about physicists staging pit-bull style "dog fights" between matter and antimatter, and placing quantum mechanics based bets to the outcome of the duels.
Remember, children, "God does not play dice!"
And let that antimatter roam free! No capture, no antimatter!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j50ZssEojtM
It explains in easy to understand words what it does.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
...and we'll have Warp Drive! Huzzah!
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
There would have to be a region of space where the matter and anti-matter interfaced, which would produce significant amounts of gamma radiation. We don't see any such interface in the visible universe (I believe current understand says that if it were there our tools are powerful enough to see it) so it would seem that the part of the universe we live in is all matter. I suppose it's possible that the interface lies somewhere outside of our visible universe though.
perhaps a better link: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2010/11/17/antimatter-atoms/
Please use this link http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101117/full/468355a.html it was the original. Tired of the FOX News links.
Scientists have captured antimatter before. I recall an interview with a physicist (I believe Colbert Report) who mentioned they had antimatter captured before. Doing a quick Google search, I found references to captured antimatter going back to 2002: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn1957-antimatter-atoms-captured-for-the-first-time.html
How do you trap a neutral antiparticle?
Tell him that his neutral anti-girlfriend is pregnant.
John
Really, that sounds more like the answer to "How do you get a neutral antiparticle to skip town and never be heard from again".
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
A neutron walks into a bar. He goes up to the counter and asks the bartender, "How much for a beer?"
The bartender looks the neutron up and down and says, "For you? No charge."
Don't worry, Gummal will take care of it. Or did will take care of it. Or will did take care of it.
Or something. Damn, the mechanics of time travel give me a headache.
Free Martian Whores!
I believe the easiest answer to this is that in the very early universe, things were hot enough that everything was an ion (the first 300,000 years). Oppositely charged particles would have collided and where particles of like types of matter would not annialate, different types of matter would. Given the conditions of the early universe being so compact, one can consider it mixed and uniform. Thus, when the universe cooled to the point that normal matter could exist and not be instantly broken back into ions, all the anti-matter was long gone.
They use the magnetic moment of the antihydrogen. They trap it for about 1/6 of a second, which isn't very long, considering we can trap charged antiparticles for weeks in Penning-Malmberg traps. But it's still impressive.
Yes yes, but what has this got to do with TimeCube?!?!
"Then again, I always keep my distance from the Vatican."
Too bad, the Vatican is a warehouse of historical art and documents that span almost 20 centuries, from ancient Celtic gold captured by Roman Emperors to some of the most exquisite illuminated French manuscripts ever known. Sculpture by Michelangelo, paintings by Titian, medieval tryptics chased with gold filigree, original manuscripts by pagan authors such as Plato, Cato, and Virgil... really amazing stuff. But you'll never see it as you have obviously made the wise choice of avoiding Christian Ground Zero. They might zap you with their evil baptism rays. Good for you.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Naw, the real question is, "Does it antimatter?"
Absolutely positively!
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
"...I love how these articles talk about THEORIES like they are pure facts. "
Not facts, theories. You do however seem to be laboring under some false pretense that scientific method is some kind of ramshackle rim-shot affair, like it doesn't really work, and is only for people who study it. People like you show what an astounding divide exists between science and the lay populace. Not that Science hasn't tried to bridge that divide, People like Sagan and Hawking have tried to do it. Those effort obviously weren't enough. A theory isn't an idea that a person, say YOU, came up with while smoking dope one day and in your haze supposed that an atom in your thumb is like the Solar System.
Most theories are 90% fact. They are fact right up to the point that experiments can be devised to prove them, then there often comes a point where there is no experiment that can be performed to prove it. Take for example relativity; Einstein was able to show that light is bent by gravity because Arthur Eddington went to the North Pole to observe light from a star bent by an eclipse in 1919. Even that wasn't enough; when atomic clocks and jets were invented in the 1950's a further aspect of relativity was shown. In the field of physics, by the way, quantum theory is the most successful theory ever advanced, it explains 95% of every aspect of physics for the topics it covers.
This idea you uneducated wretches have that the empirical method is a bunch of guys in white coats talking about crap is just that, crap. You Don't Know What You're Talking About.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
How do we know that the universe is dominated by matter versus anti-matter? What is the scientific reason that we know that the next galaxy over isn't made completely of anti-matter versus matter?
At http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/30577 you can read a slightly sarcastic piece about what it would take to hold the quantities that Dan Brown used in his books.
Nice wry write-up - I like the details..
Insert
Easy, all the particles would have tiny pointy beards if that were the case.
.evom ton seod gis eht
Not likely, we have a special image of the universe 400,000 years after it formed, the CMB from the "surface of last scattering" which shows that it was matter dominated (and very uniform) when it was 1/1100th it's present size.
Could it at all be possible that during the big bang, equal amounts of matter and anti-matter were created.
No. It is one of the Sakharov conditions on the Big Bang. While your suggestion of "random" separation is technically possible the odds against it happening are so vanishingly small that it would be more reasonable to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs by spontaneous suffocation caused by no oxygen molecules entering any dinosaur's lungs just by "random chance".
Even if you ignore the odds of it happening then there would still have to be a border between the matter and anti-matter that would be devoid of mass and we don't see a band stretching throughout the universe like this nor do we see it in the cosmic microwave background. So not only is your theory overwhelmingly improbable it is inconsistent with data.
The bartender looks the neutron up and down and says, "For you? No charge."
Of course if the bartender had been a particle physicist and looked him up and down then he would have said: "Hey you're no neutron, you are a quark short. That'll be full charge for you, you pion!"
Why not just make a container out of anti-matter? Problem solved.
... who thought he was a positron.
"Are you sure?", I asked.
"I'm positive".
*ducks*
No but I wish it were possible to annihilate all the inaccuracies in the story! Alpha has NOTHING to do with the LHC other than happening to be in the same lab. These guys need to get the anti-protons down to almost zero velocity so starting with the highest energy machine on the planet would be stupid.
In fact Alpha uses the Anti-proton Decelerator which uses the CERN Proton Synchrotron (PS) which is one of the low energy machines at CERN accelerating protons to only 25 GeV - which is so low in energy that the protons have to be accelerated by another machine, the SPS, before they can even be injected into the LHC for final acceleration!
NASA's page is good, see the last 3 paragraphs under the title "surface of last scattering"
http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/bb_tests_cmb.html
then could read the whole page from the beginning, good stuff.