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CERN Antimatter Experiment Produces First Beam of Antihydrogen
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)."
Sulphur Hexafluoride already does this.
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
Stuff that anti-matters.
So, basically, if an enemy got hold of this, it wouldn't matter? ;)
http://arxiv.org/abs/1106.0847
One of the most interesting physics papers I've read in recent years. Does away with dark matter by presuming that antimatter has the opposite gravitational sign as matter (which pops out very naturally once you apply CPT to general relativity).
As the electromagnetic force is almost 10^40 times stronger than gravity, it would be virtually impossible to test with anti-protons or positrons. But with electrically neutral anti-hydrogen, it becomes potentially testable.