CERN Antimatter Experiment Produces First Beam of Antihydrogen

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday January 21, 2014 @08:01AM from the now-we-just-need-some-dilithium-crystals dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Matter and antimatter annihilate immediately when they meet, so aside from creating antihydrogen, one of the key challenges for physicists is to keep antiatoms away from ordinary matter. To do so, experiments take advantage of antihydrogen's magnetic properties (which are similar to hydrogen's) and use very strong non-uniform magnetic fields to trap antiatoms long enough to study them. However, the strong magnetic field gradients degrade the spectroscopic properties of the (anti)atoms. To allow for clean high-resolution spectroscopy, the ASACUSA collaboration developed an innovative set-up to transfer antihydrogen atoms to a region where they can be studied in flight, far from the strong magnetic field (scientific paper)."

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Typical egg-heads, over thinking by mcmonkey · 2014-01-21 08:35 · Score: 5, Funny

This may be a case where the experts are too close to the problem to see the simple solution.
Put the antihydrogen in a container made of antimatter, then annihilation will not be an issue.
Perhaps some sort of rigid anti-dirigible
News for nerds... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-01-21 08:38 · Score: 5, Funny

Stuff that anti-matters.
Re:First! by martyb · 2014-01-21 08:54 · Score: 5, Funny

Anti-hydrogen weapon?

'Weapons that don't work if there is matter between you and the target' are probably kind of a niche at present...

So, basically, if an enemy got hold of this, it wouldn't matter? ;)